This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
An AI chat bot goes off the rails. This is a fun story. Welcome to Side Hustle School. Chris Guillebeau, your host here. And today it is our weekly segment known as Failure Friday, a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure.
So this one here today, now you may be familiar with AI or chat GPT or other LLMs, language models, basically artificial intelligence where aliens are controlling the world. I'm just kidding. That's not exactly how it works, but different websites these days are using chat bots to provide customer service, and sometimes it doesn't work so well. I saw this crazy story. It's not the one we're gonna talk about today, but I saw a story recently where someone convinced a car dealership to sell them a car for a dollar because they basically got their chat bot, their customer service automated support on their website to make them this offer.
And they did that through a series of prompts where they're trying to like reverse engineer the chat bots rules and such. So there's a lot of these things coming out all the time. There's another one in England where a chat bot started using a lot of profanity, which is not usually what you want to do in a customer service business situation. And so today we've got a listener who has an experience where his chat bot starts quoting Beyonce and Shakespeare, two incredible artists, no doubt, but who usually don't have much of a role in customer support when you're trying to get help and figure out where your package is or whatever else you need to go to a website to ask a company about. So just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you get to hear this story directly from a side hustler.
His name is David in particular today. And I'll just let him tell the story. He's got this idea about introducing a chat bot. Doesn't go as planned, but it is pretty funny. And we'll see what we can learn from it.
I'll be back at the end with a couple of quick words of wrap up. [Music]
In the digital age, integrating a chat bot into my e-commerce platform seemed like the next logical step to enhance customer service. My name's David and I sell custom designed athletic wear online. The goal was simple. Automate responses to common customer inquiries to improve efficiency and free up time to focus on growing my business.
Little did I know, my attempt to embrace AI would lead to an unforgettable mix-up blending Shakespeare and Beyonce in ways I'd never intended. I decided to use chat GPT, impressed by its ability to generate human-like text based on the prompts given. Over about a week, I customized the bot, feeding it information about my products, return policies, and shipping information. I set it live on a Friday, proud of the step towards modernizing my customer service. The weekend was busy with a new product launch, so I didn't check the bot's interaction logs until Monday morning.
What I discovered was far from the efficient digital assistant I had envisioned. Somehow, the bot had deviated from its programmed customer service responses to quoting lengthy passages from Shakespeare and randomly interspersing Beyonce lyrics. A customer asking about the shipping time for a pair of running shorts got to ship or not to ship. That is the question, followed by who run the world, girls. Queries about sizing were met with, though she be but little, she is fierce, mixed with I woke up like this, flawless.
The confusion and amusement were evident in the customer interactions. Some played along with the bot's quirky responses, while others were baffled, asking if they're still talking to a real person. My attempt to streamline customer service had turned into a weekend of literary and pop culture education. As I sifted through the logs, I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. The chat bot, designed to be a solution, had instead become a source of entertainment or confusion, depending on whom you asked.
The error stemmed from a misconfiguration in the bot's settings, allowing it to pull from a broader range of internet sources than intended. This mishap taught me several lessons. First and foremost, the importance of thoroughly testing automated systems before fully implementing them. Secondly, the realization that while AI can significantly enhance operations, it also requires close monitoring and maintenance to ensure it stays on track. Lastly, it underscored the value of a human touch in customer service.
No bot, no matter how advanced, can truly replace the nuanced understanding and empathy of human interaction. I fixed the chat bot settings, limiting its responses to predefined scripts directly related to my business. I also included a disclaimer on the chat service, informing customers they were speaking to an AI and providing an option to contact a human for more complex inquiries. While the chat bot now functions as intended, the Shakespeare and Beyonce weekend remains a memorable chapter in my business's history. It was a humbling reminder that in the world of AI, you should always expect the unexpected.
[Music]
David, thank you for sharing the story of the Shakespeare and Beyonce AI chat bot. At least in this case, it wasn't a huge disaster. You didn't have to sell a car from your dealership for a dollar. You just had to kind of make some tweaks. But I think the good reminder is, we have to be careful when we use these things because it's kind of out of our control.
Like we set parameters, but sometimes something goes wrong or wonky for whatever reason. And it really is a whole new world that we're kind of living in and encountering as it unfolds very rapidly. So of course, the tagline of failure Friday is never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. I don't think David's gonna be defeated by this, but nevertheless, that's the tagline, that's the theme. Thanks again for sharing the story.
Listeners, if you have a question, an update, or if you have a story of an AI chat bot gone wild, sidehustleschool.com/questions. This has been episode 2,659. I'll be back again tomorrow. Thanks for tuning in. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
