Apocalypse too soon

Customer help desks are a top target of money-saving schemes involving generative AI, as I reported earlier in an attempted takedown of the chatbot. Now I’m convinced that automating customer service will bring the apocalypse somewhat nearer, not because machines will become sentient, but because the machines turn perfectly normal human beings into morons.

It started when a family member included in my T-Mobile plan lost a handset. It happens.

Each month I fork over $18 to T-Mobile’s partner Assurant for handset protection, so I clicked on Assurant’s website to file a claim. But the website went into an infinite loop: To file a claim, the site demanded a one-time password sent to the handset in question, which is the handset that was lost, and therefore couldn’t receive a one-time password or anything else.

Use another handset from the same account to get the oneoo-time passwor, Assurant’s convenient pop-chat function told me. I should have known better. ChatBots make things up, as a couple of New York lawyers discovered when their AI-generated legal brief presented cases that didn’t exist. The same thing can happen with help desks.

Stupidly, I did as instructed. But Assurant’s system assumed that the lost handset needing tobe replaced was the one that had received the one-time password, namely my own handset. After I forked over a $250 deductible, Assurant promptly sent out a replacement for my handset, a venerable Samsung device that had worked uncomplainingly for years and remained comfortably nestled in my shirt pocket.

Once I was in receipt of the wrong replacement handset, I called Assurant customer service and explained the error (it was Assurant’s error, not mine). I returned the handset with the next UPS pickup.