I don’t wish to out myself as a lazy person, or a lazy mother for that matter, but I’m afraid the context of this entire interaction generally supports that claim. It was (mostly) laziness that incentivized me to order from Instacart today. I decided to do so for two reasons: 1) My youngest son has Hand-Foot-Mouth Disease again and the inside of his mouth is full of enough blisters to make lava rock look just “a little hole-y”. And 2) Before my untimely dismissal from my job in January, I purchased a year membership to Instacart+ so I wouldn’t have to deal with the cold when it is too cold, or the heat when it is too hot, or people when they are too people-y. I might as well get my most out of it.
So, with that in mind, a purchase of popsicles and diapers was desperately required, and I placed the order, utilizing the “$2 off” bonus for a little added treat to myself. After all, I am clearly a woman who is smart about money.
Now, I don’t think I need to tell you, but that order didn’t arrive. Of course that happens and it is no one’s fault, save for the delivery driver who was apparently taught Ancient Sumerian and not basic numbers in school, but whatever, we all have our days. And after realizing that the requisite picture of the delivered groceries was not of our door, nor our neighbour’s door, not anyone up or down our street, I began the arduous process of requesting a refund. Again, not a problem. I get it. We’re all just trying to live and I never want to be rude to a customer service individual. I’ve been there and the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for people who are rude, snarky, or passive aggressive to customer service workers, and politicians. And don’t worry, this isn’t some turn about where you ultimately learn I am a horrendous person, capable of invoking great levels of misery on those around me. Why are you looking at me like that? No, I don’t think you should go talk to my husba- hey! Come back here!
No, no ultimately, I was just confused. And I think the following three screenshots sum it up well.
So, as you can see, there has been some sort of miscommunication. I’m fully willing to believe that Nikhita is run off their feet so much that they mistakenly thought I said, “You bot”. And perhaps, given the general state of education these days, it might be assumed that when I said, “you bot” they naturally believed that was the best I could muster. We know differently of course. Immediately after this I was redirected to a different “person” who could be better suited to help me. My explanation that I said “You bet”, as in an affirmation that I would indeed be patient while Nikhita did their work, went unheeded.
Following this, I was passed to ‘(specialist)’ – which I believe might be a Polish name? It doesn’t matter. They cleared it up, I took the credit, and I got an additional $5 credit for being a good sport. Hoorah for me!
And then…
I know the world has changed a lot since I first published Between Fire and Pines. AI is rampant and bots are heavily leaned on to ensure companies are at the absolute peak of productivity. My husband argues that the sign off from (specialist) was too specific for a bot, but my theory is that they have real people running the profiles, but they are set up to be run only by a bot unless a customer triggers a certain word of phrase, like “Fuck, shit, damn, god, piss” or “please god let me talk to a real person because I know you are a bot.” As a creative, or at least someone masquerading as a creative at this stage in her career, AI fills me with equal parts unease, dread, and curiosity. No one wants to see their work stolen, or worse, slice and diced like a late-night television Slap-chop knock off. That doesn’t even take into account the environmental impact of running the technology necessary to haphazardly stitch together prompts like “Angry Baby who just lost everything in the stock market” or “Humanoid hamburger falling in love with three rocks wearing a trenchcoat”.
All that being said, maybe we could slow the roll just a little bit? Maybe instead of usurping the words of Shakespeare, we could, I don’t know, use AI to answer the important questions in life. Like “Why are we here?” and “Where are my groceries?” and “You bot?”
But to be fair, we don’t need AI for that last one.
I am not. I am human.
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The Code Series 