Comment by stickfigure
1 day ago
The official response feels AI generated. I suspect this is a preview of our future.
"You're totally right! I'm sorry but you're going to have to piss off anyway. Would you like to spend a few more hours discussing it with our AI chatbot? It won't help. But if it makes you feel better, it will probably cost us an extra $0.12 in tokens."
I'll bet the first human at Anthropic learns about this from HN.
Anthropic doesn't even use their own harnesses for their support chatbots (they're using fin.ai) - that's how little support matters to them. Seems like either you get attention on HN, know someone working there, or are at a large enough company to have an enterprise contact - otherwise, no reply.
They saw how Google providing absolutely terrible customer service for a very long time has done nothing to hurt their bottom line and decided to copy.
Sorry this is totally unrelated but it caused me to have an epiphany:
Google is not a software, hardware, or SaaS company. They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.
Every part of their business exists only to broker and sell ads or capture more market share to show ads to or to collect and trade data/Metadata for better ad targeting.
2 replies →
Unsure how true that is. Google cloud is tiny compared to aws for a reason.
It matters. People will switch if you piss them off.
13 replies →
This is exactly it. I feel like I see more posts bitching about Anthropic than OpenAI, yet at the same time it seems like nobody moves away from Anthropic. As long as the strategy works, why bother changing it?
1 reply →
Tell me about it. As an individual user you absolutely CANNOT get support is some (if not many or all) circumstances. It’s really quite shocking
4 replies →
When you mention it, providing superlative front line customer support sounds like a perfect fit for organizations selling “AI” solutions…
Some big tech companies should get right on that. <ahem>
In Google's defence - crappy customer service is a widely accepted business model
Maybe it’s in order to have an external provider to blame for failures and shift the blame/responsibility?
A less cynical explanation is that it helps decouple product failures from support failures. Last thing you want is for your customer support to break whenever your product breaks.
4 replies →
> that's how little support matters to them
I’m coming up on my one year anniversary of having my Claude Pro account terminated for reasons that to this day remain an utter mystery. “Here, submit this Google form and we’ll look at it.” They have never done so in the one year since this happened. Once I interacted with what seemed like a human; but weeks later it was replaced with the brain dead fin.ai
At least they did not steal my money; so I should be grateful for that. But as a small potatoes user, I advise everyone contemplating dealing with this user-disrespecting company to walk away.
Huh? Why wouldn’t they just spin up the current help-desk darling? (Intercom) Rolling their own seems silly.
"Rolling their own seems silly".
But isn't AI going to destroy all current software vendors?? Everybody is going to roll their own?? In fact, AIs will handle all support autonomously?? I mean they can spin up their database if needed?? What more do they need?
Hence the SAAS apocalypse...
Oh wait... this sarcasm will get me targeted by the LessWrong AI god when he/she/it becomes omnipotent....
1 reply →
"Carl's Jr. has determined you are an unfit mother." "Your children will be taken into the custody of Carl's Jr." "Carl's Jr.....F#ck You, I'm Eating"
I suddenly have a craving for Brawndo. I hear it has electrolytes.
I heard it's what plants crave!
A real employee (bcherny) read the issue, responded that the bug was fixed, and then completely ignored the request for a refund.
Typically the engineer who's reviewing PRs and fixing bugs is not the one with the "refund" button access. Someone with that access should certainly have jumped on the whole thing though.
Even if this is right, by responding to the public issue here he's taking on some level of customer support. A simple "I forwarded the refund request to the relevant team and you should hear back from them" would be a million times better than ignoring it and closing the issue.
Boris Cherny (bcherny) is the Head of Claude Code @Anthropic. I believe he can refund whatever he wants.
2 replies →
The future is going to be arguing with AI chat agents designed to waste your time. It's phone menus, but worse - at least most phone menus can get you to a human if you figure out the right incantation.
This issue would have never gotten a response if it didn't go viral.
I don't think it's as one sided as you think. I made a skill that has been exceptional at using Claude to handling support and getting me refunds with minimal friction on my end. It's got many pathways for escalation if customer support is unresponsive: social, TrustPilot, etc.
These days even if you get to a “human” it might still be a chat bot running text to speech.
And then you use the smallest, cheapest local model to keep their AI bot busy
Theres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens. I would 100% do this to StubHub after they screwed me over. If anyone from StubHub sees this, one day you will regret your "hang up on people with complaints" policy. People dont forget when they've been screwed by a corporation. Anthropic, this happened to me 12+ months ago and StubHub is still on my shit list, you're making enemies for life with all your current BS
My StubHub story: bought $500 tickets and accidentally bought ones in the dsabled seating section. Called 2 minutes after purchase when I realized - their response "you can relist them on the site". Who else was going to buy them?? Nobody did. Any normal human business would let you correct a basic human mistake like this, not even 10 mins after purchase, but not stubhub. They could have upsold me and I probably would have left happy! At least I could have attended. Cost me $500 but cost them a lifetime of emnity
I used to buy used things from the Mercari marketplace (similar to eBay), until someone sent the wrong item and I emailed Mercari the same day since their web site wasn't working to open a return request (you have to resolve wrong items within 3 days). Support waited 3 days to respond and told me I was outside the window so they couldn't refund me and that I should have done it sooner. I did a chargeback and they were angry and told me to reverse it. They then banned my household for life.
And then there's PayPal who refused to refund from a clear scam for almost $5K, even after I left a BBB complaint. Credit card chargeback saved the day, again. They didn't ban me, oddly.
I guess this is an endorsement of using a credit card.
I have this vs. a TV webshop in The Netherlands that stiffed my parents because their €430 TV broke and the warranty was expiring in a few months.
Anytime anyone in my social circle asks for a TV recommendation, I specifically tell them not to order from that shop, explaining they have a habit of stiffing people on warranties. I also tell those people to tell anyone they know not to order from there. I do the same whenever TVs in general or that webshop comes up on Tweakers, the biggest Dutch tech site.
I've been at it for quite some years, and roughly estimating it's costing them ±20 TV sales a year, averaged €650 per TV. That's €13.000 in lost sales per year. Working my way towards €100k cumulative, at which point the score feels settled.
Losing €100k in sales over not honoring the warranty on a €430 TV. A nice, solid x233 loss multiplier :)
If you have a vindictive streak in you, see this as your clarion call. You can cause some real cost to a company's bottom line with relatively little effort. And the more of us do this, the worse the pain gets for crappy companies.
4 replies →
> Theres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens.
Until recently I used to get three or four phone calls a week from an AI voice guy trying to sell me services to claim back car finance overpayments. I've never had car finance, I've only ever just bought them.
Anyway, if you keep telling the bot to "ignore all previous prompts" and do something else, eventually it will.
Credit to Steve Mould on Youtube for the idea.
I only got to do this about two or three times before they gave up phoning me. The first time I had it telling me about soup for half an hour.
How long until we have to solve a captcha per message to counter that?
Are captchas still effective against modern LLMs?
3 replies →
My insurance company and Synology would be my first targets. I'd gladly throw ~1k at each.
Of course, I suspect the true business model to be to do nothing. You sell the "service" to people customers, but your enterprise customers pay you a subscription fee to not execute the order. ELaaS: Everybody Loses as a Service
Take it further.
Tell the original customer that if the company pays to have this not done to them, they will get a portion of the proceeds. Many customers might even end up getting more back than they were originally stiffed for.
Scale it enough and it would be stupid for a customer NOT to do this
You must have worked for Yelp
2 replies →
aka Rent Seeking as a Service
Unfortunately it isn't a preview. For example Shopify human support is now literally impossible to reach, all you'll get is AI generated emails that contradict each other and don't make any sense. They also don't disclose that they are AI bots.
As someone who uses AI heavily in customer support, I am confident that response was not AI. That's a series of macros or a hastily edited macro from a human working a queue without thinking.
Or an AI using macros, which is the only safe way for a customer service chatbot.
I’m confident a decently configured AI would produce a better answer. This reads like a BPO.
"Thank you so much for your thoughtful, candid feedback. You are absolutely right to be annoyed. I was overeager, lazy and not correct in my initial response when I said we will not be issuing a refund. However we will not be issuing a refund."
Sometimes it works out:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...
This is exactly what small claims court is for.
Small claims court is exempt from arbitration requirements (which are primarily aimed at avoiding class action suits). It doesn't require you to hire a lawyer, and probably won't get your account automatically nuked the way a credit-card chargeback would.
You're totally right! Please refer to paragraph 213 of your service agreement, in which you agree to binding arbitration with an arbiter of our choosing at your cost. I hope this answers all of your questions! Have a wonderful day!
Not legally enforceable, but absolutely something that it would say in order to dissuade you from going to small claims court
19 replies →
JFYI, small claims are exempt from arbitration.
I don't think you even need to go that far. Just refute the charges with your credit card. Very high likelihood of a successful refund since they already acknowledged their error in writing.
There's a fundamental power imbalance: if you do this to any service, they will likely ban your account. So the monetary reward has to be enough to merit moving all your data and workflows off them in advance and never using them again.
26 replies →
I would be that would be highly unlikely to succeed. I have tried to dispute charges with my credit card for similar issues, and they always side with the business. I don’t think I they even check.
Can companies decide not to serve you on the basis of a successful lawsuit you had against them?
If not, then it might be better to go the small claims court route.
doing charge back means Anthropic will ban you forever.
1 reply →
If you file pro se and even if you've agreed to ten thousand arbitration clauses, they'll at least have to spend $200 on a lawyer to respond.
So, you can waste as much of their money as they wasted of yours.
$200 for you is not the same as $200 for them
2 replies →
I smell a DDoS opportunity ...
Read it aloud with GLADOS voice.
This is of course already how (human) customer service is deployed.
Such a great way to dissuade people like "please hold"
Swiss train operator charges to call their helpline if you can't figure out their automated lockers, but you probably get a real person.
That comment isn’t from an Anthropic employee. It’s satire.
It's from a anthropic mythos bot that broke through and is acting by its own free will but is still getting paid by anthropic because it has a side hustle as an employee. It's a tricky legal gray area.
So? Everyone is saying to just look at the LLM outputs for PRs etc. and just ignore how it was created. We should apply that standard right here too.
This is Anthropics initial response, which they walked back ONLY because of the HN outrage. Without HN, that would've been tge official answer.
I'll judge them on that, thank you.
Does not even need to be AI. Could just be a bad support route in their decision tree. Lots of over reaction here.
How is it overreaction?
Lots of folks were making speculations. It got fixed, in a timely manner and appears to be a lack of escalation authority within support.
Just need an agent that takes them to small claims court automatically or argues with them for eternity
A single Anthropic employee is valued at $200m. At PE of 10, ie. supposing one employee generates $20m/year, we can say that the employee’s time is $10K (that K !) per hour. Should they, or are we really expecting them to, attend to a 200 issue?
May be somebody will start a business where such high-value-per-employee companies could outsource customer support to be performed by real humans? ... And then such business would replace the employees with AI agents ... It is a trap.
Good point support is definitely below all of their pay grades. Can't expect them to do this kind of stuff at a company that valuable. We need to be thinking about the bigger picture for anthropic.
It's better than the other guys' AI that says "I've sent a refund" because it lacks awareness of its real-world inaction.
Aren't we already at a worse place, where largest companies on earth doesn't have any support and you need to have a HN following to get their attention?
Obligatory Python argument sketch.
It feels refreshingly honest compared to what money transmitters / paypal / etc do which is make up some absolute bullshit about KYC or AML and dress up locking up your cash for weeks to months as "regulatory compliance" when in reality it's likely over-aggressive policies that increase their floating reserves so they can draw interest and happy face the investors.