Comment by jodacola
3 days ago
Very similar thing this week, and an interesting story to go along with it!
I called my normal HVAC company for my rental home because the tenant reported the AC wasn't cooling the house. When I called, I got one of the latest AI voice assistants to help me, and it was an awful experience and I ended up not hearing back after the assistant told me the office would call me back.
So, I went over to the house and used ChatGPT to help me diagnose the issue by taking some photos of the compressor panel outside. It walked me through what to check, I provided some diagnostic codes I witnessed... and it walked me through the very simple repair of replacing the $25 capacitor. It was going to cost me almost 4x that just for the service call to diagnose what was wrong in the first place.
So, the weird experience was: Gen AI made me lose trust in my normal HVAC company, and more Gen AI basically allowed me to replace my HVAC company and do the repair myself all in one day.
With AI you just don't get the full service of a professional HVAC guy though.
Like the time I had one of the bigger shops in town come by to get a quote for replacing a dual stage fan motor on an AC. The tech asked me if I'd like them to replace the contactor while they were in there because it is a part that often fails. I asked what a contactor was and he explained it. "Oh, like a relay?" I asked. I told him to quote the cost for "replacing the contactor, while they're already in there."
He quoted me $400 for the contactor, $750 for the fan. The contactor itself I later found out was was $7. I literally laughed in his face when he said that.
So, like I said, you just aren't going to get professional level assistance from an AI. Thankfully.
To end the story: one of the other guys I called for a quote on fixing this unit repaired it for free; the unit was still under warranty and it was fully covered. The original installer of this $12K unit was refusing to return my calls. Another "Not gonna get pro level service from an AI" story.
Becoming increasingly convinced that the pattern that will stick is not AI "integrated" into everything but personal agents. As in I will have one personal assistant that helps me in all of my tasks instead of using the little ones bolted on to every product.
Even before AI, YouTube was full of videos on these topics.
Yeah, and with 95% of those videos, there'll be something they gloss over which I don't understand; or I'll have a concern which they don't address; or, conversely, they'll assume that their target audience was born in the 15th century, and spend 20 minutes building up the context, when what I really needed was about 12 seconds.
With an AI, I can say "I don't understand that part, can you explain more?" Or "what about this concern I just thought of", or "I already know almost enough about this, I just need this one gap filled in." It's an objectively better experience.
That is a very good point I had not considered: AI to level-match the material to my "learning speed". I'll give it a try at the next opportunity.
I do appreciate how helpful AI has been with troubleshooting and providing vital background info in repairing appliances. I've been doing this since before AI, as appliance repair services from professionals are all but gone where I live.
However, neither AI nor (most of) the videos can help with finagling frail snap-fit assemblies one encounters in appliances. A lot of appliance repair work is very simple but requires significant practice and figure-it-out time, in addition to waiting for sketchy parts from Ebay. Half the battle is just finding the damn parts.
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When I was a kid, if I didn't know how to spell a word and asked the teacher, a common answer was to tell me to look it up in the dictionary.
As words in a dictionary are sorted alphabetically rather than phonetically, this is unhelpful.
YouTube videos have the same kind of problem, in that you can only easily find the video explaining which dielectric unions suit your problem when already know what those are (to use an example that I had to ask ChatGPT for because I have no plumbing experience even if I did know about galvanic corrosion and therefore immediately understood why they're important once I saw the name).
You can also hopefully find user and service manuals online.
In 2009 or so a projector at some event that needed one wouldn’t start, and I noticed it was flashing a pattern, so I found a computer and internet connection (both very slow), painfully found and downloaded the manual for that model, and identified that it was saying the fan wasn’t starting. Lo and behold, a strut was broken and obstructing the fan blades, and bending it out of the way fixed it, and the event was able to begin.
I’ve found manuals for a drawbar organ, multiple digital pianos of different ages and brands, AC split systems, and more. Manuals are good stuff. They don’t cover everything, but they’re very useful.
For these sorts of things, AI is doing approximately nothing for you: you would do better (and learn more!) finding the actual manual, or you’ll want to see someone doing the thing in a video.
The bar for finding them is higher, though.
Tbh, I think people feel more comfortable asking an AI. Even though I “know” it’s all smoke and mirrors, I still prefer the human-like interaction to the grind of watching video after video and building my own understanding.
OOPS… there you see how it’s going to end. I’m the meatspace button-pusher.
But now you have a even larger problem that the initial problem you were trying to solve: trying to sieve thru millions-of-hours of just slightly tangential videos trying to find the specific video fragment you need.