The Expert Podcast

So how do you feel about dealing with a chatbot or AI versus dealing with an actual human? There's a lot of companies and customer service that are transitioning their communications to AI, and there's some pros and cons to that. An AI is going to be open 24 hours a day, so if it's 2 in the morning and you want to talk to somebody, you can reach an AI chatbot. Sometimes the AI will be able to look up answers to questions immediately. There's no one in the world who knows the answer to every question, and a chatbot or AI might be able to get the answers back. The downside is that some consumers prefer to speak to an actual human. It's unknown yet which is going to be the more desirable method of communication.

One of the downsides you can see in this article from the Independent in the UK is that there's as much automation on the internet as there are actual humans, and they're talking about having a dead internet, meaning that there's no real people on there. It's more automated accounts that are handling the communications. What does that mean? Is that better? Is that worse? The biggest reason for doing this particular video is to ask you, internet users, what you think is going to happen. Which do you prefer? Can you tell the difference when you're talking to a chat bot or AI versus talking to a real person, and which one is better? Do you walk away from that conversation with a real person thinking that that was better or that was worse? What about AI?

This article goes on to say that much of the content online is in fact automatically generated, and the number of humans is dwindling in comparison to bot accounts. So I was getting replaced by automated bots, which will soon surpass the proportion of internet traffic coming from humans, changing the way organizations approach building and protecting websites. Bots will become omnipresent again. Is this better or worse? So far, even if it's worse now, it might get better later as these technologies advance, but it is already causing problems for X and other UH social media posts, which are now hit by a huge number of comments from UH bots advertising things that you don't want to see advertising for.

One of the things that's tough is that if you can't tell the difference, neither can the platforms, so where do you see all of this going? Is it going to be a lack of human interaction, or is it going to be a utopia of vast information that we all can use at our fingertips anytime we want? What are your current opinions on this, and where do you think it's going in the future?