AI – When the bot becomes the boss

Posted on 06/10/2022 by Karen
 

Much of the world seems to be very excited about AI — Artificial Intelligence. Now, I have absolutely no issue with AI doing the heavy lifting for us...

My problem is when the bots become the boss. I’ve had bad experiences with AI and I can’t be the only one. Here are 3 of my personal examples below…

Google deleting google reviews

It took two clients asking me again for a Google Review that I had already written for me to discover that they had disappeared. Google had removed them. Google had also removed Google Reviews that some of my clients had written for me. The problem was that I had no idea how many of my reviews had been removed and who they were from.

Months of emails from me to Google (probably being responded to by AI) led to a final phone call from a real person — some poor Google employee who spent nearly an hour on the phone to me apologising profusely but telling me that they didn’t know what had been removed, they didn’t know why they had been removed, and they couldn’t help me recover them. (During the 45 minutes or so, I went from angry to apologetic, because I felt so sorry for this poor employee… what an awful job he had!)

Tinder deleting me for life

My well-meaning friends finally persuaded me to put a profile up on Tinder, telling me that it isn’t what it used to be. We weren’t even finished when up popped a message from Tinder notifying me that I was deleted for life. According to their rules, I had done something wrong. They thought I was a spammer or a false profiler or something. I found out a few weeks later that exactly the same thing had happened to a friend of mine.

Neither my friend of I are very techie and I am guessing that because we were fumbling around trying to work out how to do it, some algorithm detected ‘unusual behaviour’.

Now, to my simple mind, unusual behaviour could mean you are not techie and are trying to work out what to do because you were new to Tinder. Quite innocent, human behaviour. Surely if I was a spammer or false profiler or whatever my actions would be practiced and smooth and proficient and not detected? Whatever. No Tinder for me. Oh well, I guess I might have to meet the man of my dreams in real life.

AI copywriting

As a copywriter, much of my work involves writing content for my clients’ websites. My job is to find the right words to get the best message across to their potential customers. It needs to read well for humans, and it’s also important to impress Google so that the website gets ranked highly so their business is more easily found online.

Enter AI copywriting software. Now, I am not an expert, but I have used one program, because a client of mine specifically asked me to. After spending 3 hours on the organic copy for their home page, writing as normal, I then spent 4 hours putting it through Surfer SEO which resulted in copy that read like it had been written by a robot. Ideally, the next phase in the process was to edit it so that it did not.

The whole process would have taken about 8 hours instead of the original 3 hours and no client is going to pay for that. I hated the process, it’s not creative and a waste of time in my books. It’s uneconomical. And I don't think it gets a great result. I am not doing it.

Meanwhile, my own website and more than one of my clients’ websites is on Page 1 of Google thanks in part to my organic copywriting and no AI writing. Case closed.

AI dramas everywhere

We’re not even going to talk about the chess robot that broke a kid’s finger, Facebook’s censoring f-ups left, right and centre and the Robodebt fiasco. I am assuming that some very well-meaning techie somewhere writes an algorithm which sounds good in theory but doesn’t work well in the real world.

As I said when I emailed back to a real person at Tinder who was apologising that my profile was banned for life, it’s a shame that a robot can make random rules that a real human being then cannot override.

I think it’s safe to say there will be no self-driving car for me.