And breathe...
A new monster in town and running back to the olden days
Forget AI slop, there’s a new monster in town.
Over the past 48 hours, I’ve gone into the abyss, dealing with a call centre resolution dispute after we had to abandon our family trip to the seaside.
We arrived at our holiday home to find it had no running water and was uninhabitable.
I called said holiday agency and explained the very significant challenges it was causing.
Enter the new monster.
It was not a person.
It was a combination of a real human speaking to me using what seemed to be in-the-moment AI prompts. They came across as almost aggressively desperate to hold fast to the company policy RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) script, produced in real time.
And as you can probably imagine, this part-human, part-AI chimera combo had a chaotic and bizarre way of conversing.
It was ugly. It was sad, actually.
I could hear in his voice the first call handler struggling to maintain the policy line while also doing his best to be sympathetic. It sounded like he was lost in the mayhem of rules and regulation; his human compassion sounded audibly muzzled.
Near the end of the call, with a weary voice, I said to him, ‘My friend, please put the script down for just one second. Human to human. Do you understand what we are facing here with no running water? It’s becoming a disaster holiday.’
To which he replied along the lines of, ‘I do understand you are having an ongoing issue with your accommodation. Please know that we take all issues with our service with utmost seriousness. We will do our best to find a resolution to the concerns you have raised with us. For now, I suggest you take a good night’s rest.'
Cold. Corporate. Policy prose. But in his voice I could hear the wrestle to escape. To share how he agrees it’s a crap situation we’re in and what a time to face it – hey, on the first week of your summer holidays!
But no.
We ended up needing to vacate the property the following morning and requested a full refund.
Humans feed AI; AI feeds humans. What fresh hell is this?
In other news… I have a very strong feeling that we’re going to see a huge resurgence in nostalgia buys. And it’s all part of the AI slop backlash. I’ve never really been big on eBay, but I’m now genuinely excited looking at listings from old computer consoles I played in the 80s.
It’s a compulsion formed as I flee the slop. I need to go back to find my old stuff – stuff where I stretched my brain and got frustrated waiting for my ZX Spectrum to load.
An article I found online from journalist Daniel Trock seems to support this hypothesis.
The current state of consumer technology, and especially the internet, is one of aggressive monetization, engagement farming, and AI-powered fabrication. All major devices must be connected to the internet constantly and use that connection to constantly poke and nudge you for your attention and interactions. Individuals use generative AI to manufacture content to drive engagement, whether it's scraping together fake artwork or outright falsifying information to scare and provoke. AI's increasing ubiquity and steady evolution, in particular, is worrying, as it's gradually becoming more difficult to determine what is and isn't real, or who is and isn't a real person. Where past technologies were quaint in their capabilities, AI's early days of six-fingered hands only become more worrying as it simply gets better at lying to us.
From AI Might Be Behind The Current Shift Towards ‘80s Nostalgia - Here’s Why Daniel Trock.
Yes, the generative AI honeymoon is now over for me, and I’m well in the ‘run away!’ stage. But I’m still fascinated by its take-up and progression. I hope that generative AI does more good than harm, not in what it does in and of itself, but in what it leads us (humans) to do in response.
We are amazing. We are fragile and precious and unique. And we thrive in overcoming, not in offloading our struggles.
What a time to be alive.