LLMs are God’s gift to businesses that want to pretend to care about customers?

by philg

An email from The Google regarding a merchant replying to a review that I left two years ago (pre-ChatGPT):

Here’s the full text of the reply:

Thank you for taking the time to leave us a 5-star review for Calaveras Cantina in Jupiter. We are delighted to hear that you enjoyed our upscale Mexican food and competent service. Our team takes great pride in providing a pleasant dining experience for our guests.

We are glad to know that you found our tableside guacamole to be excellent. We are always looking for ways to enhance our menu and we appreciate your recommendation. We are also happy to hear that you found our location to be kid-friendly with the adjacent marina.

We hope to see you and your family again soon at Calaveras Cantina. Thank you for choosing us for your Mexican restaurant needs.

Best regards,
Calaveras Cantina Team

Pulling out and repeating phrases from my review is something that only a psychotherapist or an LLM would do, so I’m guessing that this restaurant discovered that ChatGPT could be used to generate a personal reply to every customer who left a review.

We were promised flying cars and instead AI gives us fake personal expressions of gratitude.

8 thoughts on “LLMs are God’s gift to businesses that want to pretend to care about customers?”

  1. Someday, the therapist who moonlights as their social media manager is going to see this post and cry.

  2. Right when we’ve become almost 100% dependent on the Web, the signal:noise ratio goes almost completely to zero.

    (Another example is the difference between the parameteric search on Craigslist and the chaotic hell that is Facebook Marketplace)

  3. They are fake whether produced by a human or ChatGPT, so why would you care? Can you imagine sincere personal replies to customer feedback? I guess you can get ChatGPT to write some.

    From ChatGPT:

    Can you write a brief response to a feedback note from a customer I don’t want to see again?

    Dear [Customer’s Name],

    Thank you for your feedback. We’ll take it into consideration moving forward. If you have any further comments, feel free to share them with someone who cares.

  5. @FB : totally agree about the signal to noise ratio. At some time we will reach a point where 90% of the content is AI generated and it will flood the web with AI content that which was already flooded with human content. We won’t know any more if we are dealing with a real human or not. Like being catfished on a grand scale. If you knew 90% of the “people” you follow or interact with were going to be bots – would you want to interact with others? Would you want to read their blogs? What meaning is there to anything if it is just made up LLM?

    • If you knew 90% of the “people” you follow or interact with were going to be bots – would you want to interact with others? No!
      Would you want to read their blogs? No!
      What meaning is there to anything if it is just made up LLM? No meaning!

  6. @Philip, how different is this LLM from, say, companies’ PR, news reporting, a White House briefing, or a president answering reporters questions?

    The days where we used to get an upfront honest answer, like someone telling you “you are dumb, dumb” for being dumb, like Toucan Sam would say, are gone.

  7. I detest the term “Artificial Intelligence”.

    What we call THAT now is nothing more and nothing less than Artificial Stupidity. Pretty good model of most humans, in fact.

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