YHK - yet another hacker news clone

ChatGPT Keeps Telling People 404 Media Can Solve Their Tech Support Problems

116 points cdrnsf 1 hour ago 28 comments

exabrial 1 hour ago | parent

I wouldn't complain about this, I'd turn it into a business opportunity and sell the leads somewhere

fckgw 1 hour ago | parent

Leads for what? Restoring Meta accounts?

nilamo 40 minutes ago | parent

Valid and recently used email address, with lots of related accounts in the email body.

chronogram 48 minutes ago | parent

I don't see the author complaining about it, instead he thought it was an interesting story. So I guess he already did that.

I have my business email read first by an LLM, I imagine someone who works at a tech-oriented website does too so those emails are basically filtered into a pile anyway.

vatsachak 1 hour ago | parent

This is just sad. Just because these businesses don't charge you a fee doesn't mean they shouldn't be customer support. An Instagram account can be someone's occupation these days.

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

So can vandalizing public property. which is apparently how big tech companies feel when you try to enjoy yourself on the platform instead of simply consuming their slop.

Frieren 1 hour ago | parent

Capitalism cannot solve this problem. If I can get free support for my business why shouldn't I?

There was a time that reputation damage could counter valance that. But, nowadays, what the average working calls thinks does not matter because money is not on their side. Most money is in the super-rich pockets, and they are the ones that profit from abusing society. Until that is solved, I see a painful future for any people willing to give their own time for free.

cwillu 19 minutes ago | parent

The gig companies that are _directly_ people's occupation are the same way. Support actually emphasizes that they cannot actually do anything every time I call them. They actually say those words.

AlienRobot 16 minutes ago | parent

>Just because these businesses don't charge you a fee doesn't mean they shouldn't be customer support

Isn't there customer support for their actual customers, who buy ads?

phoghed 1 hour ago | parent

ChatGPT is right, the only chance you have to get human attention from these companies is something like this. Go viral, get in the news. Maybe you could sue them if you had the money and time.

ceejayoz 1 hour ago | parent

StackOverflow had this problem, too; various large companies would put "for support, ask on StackOverflow!" style wording in place, with predictable results.

nomilk 44 minutes ago | parent

> for support, ask on StackOverflow!

Just a euphemism for "we have no customer support". In fairness, it's a more helpful suggestion than just a customer support stonewall.

Some companies had employees monitor their company's Stack Overflow tag. I think Stripe did that. I probably benefited from that at least a few times, which, in those moments of need, would have been quite helpful.

slg 1 hour ago | parent

I don't think people are ready for the amount of work AI agents are going to be creating for real humans. We're effectively putting the tools of mass spammers in the hands of everyone and it's going to be incredibly frustrating for all involved. "If it takes me 30 seconds to fire off a prompt that has potential to benefit me it's worth it regardless of the 2 minutes of work it creates for a dozen people" scaled to all of society.

Frieren 1 hour ago | parent

I see a future where AI is banned to avoid that situation. If AI creates too much work and ends reducing advanced countries output then something will need to be done.

Individually, AI helps me to be more productive. But, as you point out, at society level makes everybody less productive. So, I have no incentive to stop. Nobody has. Only if we all agree to stop using it then it works. A tragedy of the commons problem.

CodingJeebus 36 minutes ago | parent

But how does a true AI ban actually look in practice? The open weight models are out there, the hardware is out there. Spamming is already illegal but so commonplace that it's pretty laughably enforced at this point. Even really heinous stuff in the dark corners of the web still finds its way into the hands of users, I don't see how AI is any different in this regard.

sedan_baklazhan 4 minutes ago | parent

A true [AI as-we-know-it-today] ban would require author consent on all materials added to a model, resulting in royalty payments (btw, I believe that’s how it should have been done from the start).

chneu 33 minutes ago | parent

Lol bans don't work. Next up let's ban drugs.

Oh wait

otabdeveloper4 6 minutes ago | parent

Works for China and Russia. Skill issue.

cyanydeez 55 minutes ago | parent

On the upside, maybe some people will realize just how much trash we already were swimming in before it became economical to produce.

Like, if you pay attention to American politician bribery scandals, I think most people come to the conclusion: how fucking cheap are American politicians? They'll take a fucking hamburger to screw over their constituents.

Grombobulous 49 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like the AI job apocalypse won’t happen, we’ll have plenty of Bullshit Jobs available to fix AI mistakes.

goldenarm 48 minutes ago | parent

Since the robocall tsunami of the 2020s, people stopped answering phone calls entirely.

The same thing might happen to the entire internet.

tracerbulletx 28 minutes ago | parent

Definitely. There are still some areas of the internet with high enough signal to noise ratio, but many areas of the internet I just don't go now (pretty much anywhere remotely mainstream that is valuable to monetize attention and not heavily curated against it) because I just feel my self being manipulated the entire time and its mostly anger and frustration they use to activate a response from you.

CodingJeebus 23 minutes ago | parent

I've had this exact experience a few times now on Reddit where I see a viral video and people point out that it's AI, and I don't always realize it right away. It's just not worth consuming content anymore that I don't feel confident about the provenance of.

So much of the front page was ragebait before AI, but ragebait that could be AI-generated is a hard nope for me.

Loughla 14 minutes ago | parent

I deleted my Reddit account when they killed 3rd party apps. I have no social media except Reddit and HN. My excuse for keeping Reddit was that the content was good, if you just curated your subs.

After killing it, and never going back to that site since, I can tell you that it gets your blood pressure up. Before chatbots, most popular content, even in the better subreddits were, essentially, ragebait.

Do your blood pressure a favor and stop going to reddit. HN is okay because it's slower paced and, typically, ragebait is discouraged here.

ctoth 23 minutes ago | parent

Except most people aren't mass spammers, and most people aren't actually heard most of the time, and most of our systems are actually set up to make sure this continues to be the case.

How about AI will show us where we are intentionally underfunding things we have promised people?

xacky 25 minutes ago | parent

It all started when people linked to lmgify instead of just giving the answer.

InsideOutSanta 17 minutes ago | parent

All the spam this generates probably sucks for 404 Media, but the underlying problem is that ChatGPT is right. If you have any kind of problem with these overgrown, understaffed companies, your only chance is to get media attention.

Apple famously put "if you run to the press and trash us, it never helps" into their App Store Guidelines for developers, but the only reason they did have to do that is because it's a lie. Running to the press is the only thing that helps, which is why people do it.