Elon Musk has been all over the news talking about the dangers of AI. I am beginning to suspect we face a different danger than what he envisioned. Poor AI. I have been working for a month to gain access to one of my Amazon business accounts. I am sure my problem is not unique. It is a business account, and the girl who set it up used her phone number for the 2 Step Verification. She is long gone and the phone number is not accessible. Simple problem, right?
Simple for a person to fix, but I have been dialoging with an "Account Specialist." who I suspect is either staffed by idiots, or some pretty poor AI. The consistency of the poor answers is pushing me more toward suspecting poor AI.
The process is pretty simple, or should be. To recover the account, you must submit a government-issued ID to verify your identity. So far so good. I upload the drivers license of the owner of the company, but no, that is not right. I get this message.
"We received your documents, but they did not contain the information we need to confirm that your account recovery request is legitimate. Use the following link to upload the documents again."
Who would write such a thing? We received your documents but they are wrong, so send them again. Are you kidding? I tried sending a whole range of documents but always got the exact same email. If I reply with a question, like, "What documents do you want?" I get another response from "no-reply" advising me to start over with the whole account recovery process. It is a hopeless loop, and the AI system never gets tired of repeating the process, and it costs Amazon nothing.
Oh no, maybe this is AI's plan to drive all humans crazy so it can take over!
Technology? ...so helpful at times! ...so overwhelming and wasteful at times! And my question, who is AI? ...so we can discover "the plan." Having fun, my friend!