[HN Gopher] Don't Make Me Talk to Your Chatbot
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Don't Make Me Talk to Your Chatbot
Author : pkilgore
Score : 36 points
Date : 2026-03-03 22:24 UTC (35 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (raymyers.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (raymyers.org)
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| Related: Please don't make me talk to your AI pretend-human
| complete with Asian accent and background call center sounds.
| That's even more insulting that a chat bot.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Who did this?
| kokanee wrote:
| I view the issue of inefficient communication as a problem that
| will wane as LLMs progress, and a bit idealistic about the
| efficiency of most human-to-human communication. I feel strongly
| that we shouldn't be forced to interact with chatbots for a much
| simpler reason: it's rude. It's dismissive of the time and
| attention of the person on the other end; it demonstrates
| laziness or an inability to succeed without cutting corners, and
| it is an affront to the value of human interaction (regardless of
| efficiency).
| ericd wrote:
| I feel like that ship sailed long ago with phone trees and
| hour-long support wait times becoming normal. I'd much rather
| talk to a chatbot than wait for an hour for a human who doesn't
| want to talk to anyone.
| nickff wrote:
| The problem is that people are very rude to customer service
| representatives, so companies spend money training CSRs, who
| often quit after a short period of being abused by customers.
| Automated reception systems disallow people from reaching
| representatives for the same reason.
| senko wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about (customer support) chatbots,
| which _can_ be a good thing.
|
| " _Don 't make me talk to your [customer support] chatbot_" reads
| like " _Don 't make me go to an ATM for a cash withdrawal_". If I
| can solve a thing quickly and effectively without waiting forever
| to speak to an overworked customer support agent on another
| contitent, I would very much like that!
|
| Well, anyways, the post is not about that. It's about posting AI-
| generated text (blog posts, PR summaries). Which I agree with,
| although there are a bunch of holes in the argument, such as:
|
| > _1. Figure out what you want to say. 2. Say it. That first
| figuring-out part is important._
|
| Well, yeah, I can figure out what I want to say, then have the
| chatbot say it. So looks like the second part is important, too.
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(page generated 2026-03-03 23:00 UTC)