I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
That is something that AI is not giving us today. By design. Companies are not switching to AI customer service because it's better or cheaper for the same service. They are choosing to replace customer service with AI chat bots that simulate the customer service experience without actually providing the service part.
> I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
Every time a business tries to make a "connection" its really just an avenue to exploit or manipulate me. I've never had them making a connection for my benefit (i.e. take a hit to their bottom line).
I'm not asking for altruism but I am asking for them to drop the pretense and quit bullshitting me.
Then they’re doing it wrong. That’s a faux “connection” that just serves the business and not you. I would bet that if you experienced true connection, you’d love it, but you’ve been scammed by fraudsters so many times that you are suspicious of anything that doesn’t feel strictly transactional.
Even the first story in the article sounds gross and creepy to me "The team became mini-concierges. Every guest walked in to find someone who knew them — not in a creepy, surveillance-state way, but in the way a good friend remembers what you’re going through."
I'm not going through anything. I just want some dinner.
And to be clear, the only reason they are doing this is strictly transactional. Good friends don't ask you to pay the bill at the end of dinner.
My parents used to go to the same restaurant every Friday night, for many many years. A little chit chat at the register each visit, it doesn't take long before you actually enjoy seeing that person. I began to suspect they continued going just so they had an excuse to see their friends.
You can't engineer these relationships, but you can encourage your staff to be open to a little chit chat. Make sure your team has the time and energy to be friendly. Your team has to be happy, and its needs to show.
I have no problem with the idea that you are going fill your place with good vibes so people actually want to go and hang out there!
Unless you can give a specific example of a "true connection", I don't think they would.
To "go beyond their expectations" requires understanding what they expected to begin with. They just told you that they want a transaction, not a sales pitch or series of intrusions. Things are considered trivial when they do not fit that person's lifestyle. Doing a whole lot of "yes and", rough personality profiling, or goal guessing isn't going to cut it either.
Many people just want to be left the hell alone. Many people have even shouted from the rooftops they'd pay absurd money to be left the hell alone. I guess nobody wants to make money, nor provide a "true connection".
Businesses say they're trying to build "connection", but all they care about is getting customers to spend more and remain loyal to them. They don't care about connecting, which is why they will always fail.
You remind me of a hotel stay in Asia I had. After 10 minutes in the room, I get a WhatsApp message: "Welcome Mr. netsharc. How do you find the room?" (it was more verbose than this). It's from a business account which is the hotel (it's part of an international chain). I wanted to reply "Fine, but I don't want to talk to a bot. Leave me the hell alone." but thought it would upset the person on the other side since the country runs on politeness.
I imagine if I did reply like that there'd be some profuse apologizing, to which I'd think "Yeah, yeah, whatever, just leave me alone.".
All the businesses asking for a rating after I interacted with them also piss me off. Or worse, apps. I give them a bad rating on the play store with the text that the low score is due to the "Spam begging for app store ratings."
It is particularly bad when they use their workers as human shields. "If you are satisfied with my service please leave a 5star review, my name is Samantha, we get in trouble for less than 5 stars".
That's because we don't make connections with businesses - we make connections with people. That one nice hair dresser. The pharmacist that goes out of her way to make sure my mom's medicines are right. A cashier that's just pleasant to talk with.
Years ago I did most of my grocery shopping at Target. I cared almost nothing about Target the chain. Or Target the super store. I did care about Betty the checker and wanted to know how her grandkids were doing this week.
Me neither. I just want a business to get my stuff done in a standard way. Clear pricing upfront and no haggling. No surprise. If I hire someone to take care my yard, then take care of the yard. The price is reasonable. The plants thrive. The lawn is green. The irrigation system just works and does not leak. Connection, what connection?
What is the standard way? There are details which requires having a conversation and a relationship.
I certainly don't want a service to come early morning and wake up my kids or in the afternoon polluting the whole neighborhood with noise and fumes when I want to spend time outside.
If I was getting 8 $ burritos with clearly marked ingredients and total automation end to end, I would gladly work with such a variant of Chipotle as well, even if it cuts workforce by 80% in such a scenario.
Frivolous employment maximisation with words like human connection do not make sense for survival necessities. It works better with discretionary spending
Note that for the businesses mentioned in the article, the service is the product.
I don't care about service at a gas station - I want to fill my tank, pay, and get out. It's different when I take it to the mechanic - it's a rather old car, and I appreciate them talking intelligently about what the options are and what repairs they would suggest.
The grab app shows un-skippable ads. And some taxis even have ads "based on your interests" playing on a TV in front of your seat. I found their "no marketing" ;) to be almost too much.
I choose Grab mainly because I always have installed for GrabPay payments. Sometimes I use Gojek (often unloaded because my phone doesn't have much storage) because it's cheaper.
I avoid first-party taxi apps because they're shit and do dumb stuff like charge a 10% surcharge for credit card payments. They could get away with it 20 years ago, but I'm so glad Uber, Grab, and all the others are eating their lunch.
i love connecting with a bookseller at a local independent bookstore. or a bartender. or a server. etc. such a more interesting life if you connect with people at the businesses in your community
I dunno, I talk to the Doordash bot, it gives me a refund for the failed delivery because it didn't score me as doing fraud, I don't care there was no human involved. It's certainly an upgrade over the menu-driven approach that has no room for deviation.
Yea, on the same note I've had to call the cable company for internet outages a few times recently and the AI system handled the situation well. A few times it was neighborhood outages that it saw. One other time the system reset the modem configuration and the system came up, and one time it saw the interface on the modem was receiving errors and switched me over to a human to send a truck.
It really was much better than most cable related tech calls I've had.
>> I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
I do want a connection. Because connection is what ensures that the transactional interactions continue to work outside of the "happy path". Connection is what ensures that you can return those expensive headphones you bought because extended use makes your neck hurt, even though the return window has passed.
I had read 80% of the post and loved it. Then I came to see few comments - Saw yours and now having difficulty reading further. That means:
1. AI has gotten better - or eventually most people would like reading AI generated content
2. Author is just using AI to post-process - content is original
I feel like the author wrote like the full plan/ substance himself, and gave to an AI the formatting. It's quite fine for me so actually, as long as the substance make sense/is logical.
> He called the restaurant. He was put on hold for thirty minutes. When someone finally answered, they were apologetic but firm — the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door.
If that was written by a human, it's embarrassing.
I can only speak for myself here, but if I feel like I've read a whole paragraph that should have been half a sentence, that's my signal there's possibly AI generated content in there
I have definitely noticed other people using LLM-choice words, myself included, more frequently. It's a strange phenomenon to witness. Obviously the models got them from us first so there must've been some popularity there prior, but the boost is clear. Blast radius, load-bearing, shape, and so on. Or maybe they were always there and my confirmation bias is in high gear.
One I've started noticing is the "quotation marks around a phrase awkwardly trying to bundle a concept" thing. Like all LLM cliches it's something that has been used in writing for a long time, but I've seen it so much more recently. I think lots of people have picked this up from seeing LLMs use it. But like you said, who knows.
I do have a sneaking suspicion it's a mix of things, I'm at the point now that I do get a bit of an odd feeling whenever I'm reading AI produced content
I suspect over time it will get good enough that I'll need a larger sample size to identify it, however that won't solve what I think of as the "why does this need to exist" problem, I've noticed that a fair bit of AI content hits that mark, it can be fun, but I've not experienced that feeling of engaging with something that's been well thought out / executed, maybe we'll hit that point[0], but I suspect it will take a while
How does Pangram detect this? How do we know this is any more reliable than just asking any HN user to judge a text for AI signs, i.e. how is this more authoritative than the comments you're responding to?
Since I couldn't be bothered, I had AI read it and tell me the outcome: they did in fact go to online-only bookings, freeing the staff from the phones so they could help customers more.
I always wonder how people can tell. For this particular article, was it the thirty-four occurrences of em dashes with spaces on either side? Something else obvious?
It is the em dashes and the excessive wordiness as well as a lot of "not this, but that".
Eg:
"Not dramatically. Just quietly. " -- This is filler words. Whether it's dramatic or quiet has no relevance to the point they're making.
It also loves threes: "Well-modelled, properly sourced, beautifully visualised to requirements" - again, all irrelevant. The point they're making is that it's measuring the wrong thing, not that "beautifully visual things can be incorrect".
"There’s a piece of this conversation that most leaders miss, and it’s the part I care about most" - this hook of "most people miss" it is very common in AI writing.
It was the content. So many very specific claims with no source, just stuff being made up. I don't know who Brené Brown is, perhaps she specifically researches trust, but how curious that her daughter can raise a problem with trust, specifically cite two named behaviours that build trust, and then Brown just happens to have a database of trust-building behaviours to hand, that she hasn't even analysed, ready to output a teachable moment.
I personally thought to myself "written by AI" after this part:
... the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door. In trying to humanise the process, he’d made it worse.
I'm sure some people write this way, but most don't. And AI writes this way.
Articles of this type suggest a fun game: "LLM or Marketroid?" Because either one could have written it, and both are capable of about equivalent levels of original thought. (whoops did i just say that out loud)
Well, sometimes there's flat-out nonsense that seems to have been written purely to back into the author's thesis:
You cannot design an algorithm that eavesdrops on dinner conversation and dispatches someone to buy a street hot dog, because the person on the receiving end would immediately sense the machinery of it.
But usually there's also:
- Word count hovering between four and five thousand words
- Dramatic/narrative section titles
- "No X, no Y. Just Z"
Last but certainly not least, there's the Lists of Exactly Three Things. I counted literally thirty in this piece. Examples:
- "...the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised."
- "Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?"
- "You can’t purchase it, automate it, or accelerate it with a clever marketing campaign."
- "...forgive outages, laugh off a late delivery, stay through a price increase."
- "...the food arrives hot, the bill is accurate, the room is clean."
- "You notice, you adjust, you respond."
This is great advice, as long as you remember you need both hospitality and service. At some point a warm relationship doesn’t compensate enough for a bad product.
I love that the staff at my little neighborhood bank remembers me, and was so warm and helpful when I had to open an estate account when my mom died, and sometimes I bring my favorite teller a latte on my way back from the coffee shop.
But I still switched my business account to Chase, because my little neighborhood bank’s website is stuck in about 2005, and I just couldn’t put up with it any longer!
Maybe what's also important is that the hospitality "relationship" grows on both sides and the customer has an understanding why the staff knows them.
I'm a regular at a few coffee shops near my home and I know the staff there "know" me - it's enough to have a pleasant conversation sometimes. But that works, because we have gotten to the "familiar face" part over a longer period and at the same time.
What the restaurant owner wants is that his staff somehow treat everyone like a regular and have spirited conversations about their life events, even if they just entered the restaurant for the first time.
The staff might even be able to pull that off, with a hefty dose of online profiling - but even then, I cannot see how anyone who isn't a completely detached business type wouldn't find this extremely creepy.
> He called the restaurant. He was put on hold for thirty minutes. When someone finally answered, they were apologetic but firm — the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door.
> In trying to humanise the process, he’d made it worse.
> Here’s where most stories would end with “so they moved everything online and fired the reservation staff.” That’s not what happened. They did move to online booking, but they kept the entire reservation team and repurposed them. These people now spent their days learning about the customers coming in that night. Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?
I have questions...
a) how does moving to online reservations help with "it's fully booked" if it's booked even before then?
b) what was "the entire reservation team" even doing that a phone call takes 30min to service and then just results in "nope we're full"?
In a lot of businesses, online reservations or tickets are scalper-prone, so I can absolutely see a desire to avoid that, and would be fully supportive of moving those things to phone or in-person. But that doesn't seem to be the case here, the story is just "He wanted the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised."
Which is plausible enough, but the details don't seem to add up. Is it even a true story? (Or is it the sort of plausible-but-internally-inconsistent thing you might get if you told an LLM to generate such a story about a restaurant?)
There are still a lot of old people that love calling places and havent/won't get the hang of online systems.
Also restaurants of all sorts seem to have no one dedicated to answering the phone any longer. It's really problematic when you are trying to set up larger parties (9 to 12 people for example) at the last minute, which many places can handle but the online system won't do any more than 8 and there is no way to reach them other than messaging that may take a day.
For many businesses, AI is a mechanism to try to keep costs lower because the value of money is decreasing more and more. So if we don't implement AI and the business can't cut costs elsewhere? what's going to happen? There's going to be demand destruction and a potential lower quality of life.
One thing I have a question: what about business that doesn't have hospitaly/B2C? Many exemples relies on the F&B business, which is quite special in the fact that one of the core value proposition is directly hospitality, so we could argue that "adding more hospitality" is actually their core business already.
But what about a company which is more in B2B, and where procurement will be more rationalized (e.g RFP, which is often regulated)?
One thing as well: this is moat from an organization point of view, but unfortunately not for the individual: soft skills are often easier to get than hard skills, and there is so already a competition on the job market for the client-facing roles, even before AI arrival: like Sales / Business Developers / Account Managers (or more internal roles to try to build something that the client would need, like Product Managers)
> Every guest walked in to find someone who knew them — not in a creepy, surveillance-state way, but in the way a good friend remembers what you’re going through.
...said every company that does creepy surveillance ever.
Because it's not reliable enough to let it do anything which might cost the service provider. This is the cost of hallucinations. You can't let the customer service AI issue refunds, or upgrade someone to a better room. Not yet, anyway. Agentic AI systems with any real power generate minor disasters on a regular basis.
> If every company uses the same AI tools to optimise the same metrics, the optimisation itself becomes commodity. Everyone has the same chatbot, the same personalisation engine, the same churn predictor. The floor rises for everyone simultaneously, which means relative advantage disappears. The only remaining differentiator — the actual moat — becomes the irreducibly human: genuine empathy in a crisis, a person who actually cares, a brand that feels run by real people who listen.
Yes, this is what every article proclaiming AI will be the end for human jobs completely misses. Ultimately businesses must compete and things that become scarce or harder to attain, such as human connection, will become their real differentiator. Businesses are still selling to humans at the end of the day.
This article was great and provides a lot of wonderful examples of how to build high touch businesses. It reminds me a lot of Delivering Happiness by the late Tony Hsieh and his experiences building a high touch culture for Zappos to differentiate with the ecommerce businesses he was up against who all resorted to bad customer support, poor return experiences. A famous example being Tony calling into Zappos' support line pretending to be a customer ordering a pizza as a joke, and his customer support actually caring enough to ensure a pizza was delivered to him. Probably a book more relevant than ever
Don’t make up restaurant anecdotes if you’ve never worked in a restaurant. (Or, in this case, have your favorite chat bot do it.) A white collar worker could eat 3 meals per day in restaurants and still, very deliberately, have no idea what makes them tick. Even the fanciest restaurants operate nothing like a tech company. You just end up looking ridiculous to the bazillion people who have worked in them.
I'm genuinely trying to cut down on complaining about slop writing, but how are you going to say:
Ask yourself where you’re using technology to replace human moments rather than amplify them
...right after you've subjected me to four thousand(!) words of preachy BS about connecting with humans instead of taking shortcuts?
Let me say it again because I'm really getting sick of recent blog word count inflation: if you publish four thousand words on some topic, you better be an expert, a strong writer, whatever. Find a better reason than SEO to go over 1500 words.
I agree. AI and some of these type of digital platforms are making interactions more efficient, maybe ..less costly but efficiency isn’t the same thing as a real connection. Instead of investing in AI/digitization maybe it's better to invest in employee training and growth.
I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
That is something that AI is not giving us today. By design. Companies are not switching to AI customer service because it's better or cheaper for the same service. They are choosing to replace customer service with AI chat bots that simulate the customer service experience without actually providing the service part.
> I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
Every time a business tries to make a "connection" its really just an avenue to exploit or manipulate me. I've never had them making a connection for my benefit (i.e. take a hit to their bottom line).
I'm not asking for altruism but I am asking for them to drop the pretense and quit bullshitting me.
Then they’re doing it wrong. That’s a faux “connection” that just serves the business and not you. I would bet that if you experienced true connection, you’d love it, but you’ve been scammed by fraudsters so many times that you are suspicious of anything that doesn’t feel strictly transactional.
I’ll take “No true Scotsman” for $800 thank you Alex.
Even the first story in the article sounds gross and creepy to me "The team became mini-concierges. Every guest walked in to find someone who knew them — not in a creepy, surveillance-state way, but in the way a good friend remembers what you’re going through."
I'm not going through anything. I just want some dinner.
And to be clear, the only reason they are doing this is strictly transactional. Good friends don't ask you to pay the bill at the end of dinner.
I thought of an example of how this should work.
My parents used to go to the same restaurant every Friday night, for many many years. A little chit chat at the register each visit, it doesn't take long before you actually enjoy seeing that person. I began to suspect they continued going just so they had an excuse to see their friends.
You can't engineer these relationships, but you can encourage your staff to be open to a little chit chat. Make sure your team has the time and energy to be friendly. Your team has to be happy, and its needs to show.
I have no problem with the idea that you are going fill your place with good vibes so people actually want to go and hang out there!
Unless you can give a specific example of a "true connection", I don't think they would.
To "go beyond their expectations" requires understanding what they expected to begin with. They just told you that they want a transaction, not a sales pitch or series of intrusions. Things are considered trivial when they do not fit that person's lifestyle. Doing a whole lot of "yes and", rough personality profiling, or goal guessing isn't going to cut it either.
Many people just want to be left the hell alone. Many people have even shouted from the rooftops they'd pay absurd money to be left the hell alone. I guess nobody wants to make money, nor provide a "true connection".
I mean, I feel like that's what kentm is saying.
Businesses say they're trying to build "connection", but all they care about is getting customers to spend more and remain loyal to them. They don't care about connecting, which is why they will always fail.
You remind me of a hotel stay in Asia I had. After 10 minutes in the room, I get a WhatsApp message: "Welcome Mr. netsharc. How do you find the room?" (it was more verbose than this). It's from a business account which is the hotel (it's part of an international chain). I wanted to reply "Fine, but I don't want to talk to a bot. Leave me the hell alone." but thought it would upset the person on the other side since the country runs on politeness.
I imagine if I did reply like that there'd be some profuse apologizing, to which I'd think "Yeah, yeah, whatever, just leave me alone.".
All the businesses asking for a rating after I interacted with them also piss me off. Or worse, apps. I give them a bad rating on the play store with the text that the low score is due to the "Spam begging for app store ratings."
It is particularly bad when they use their workers as human shields. "If you are satisfied with my service please leave a 5star review, my name is Samantha, we get in trouble for less than 5 stars".
> All the businesses asking for a rating after I interacted with them also piss me off.
Singapore Airlines automatically emails passengers after a flight asking for a Net Promoter Score rating [1].
I have a feeling those ratings are mostly unseen, and cabin crew have chimed in that those ratings are unlikely to affect their promotions in any way.
What does help with their career is qualitative feedback written in through their feedback form.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
> I do not want a "connection" with a business.
That's because we don't make connections with businesses - we make connections with people. That one nice hair dresser. The pharmacist that goes out of her way to make sure my mom's medicines are right. A cashier that's just pleasant to talk with.
Years ago I did most of my grocery shopping at Target. I cared almost nothing about Target the chain. Or Target the super store. I did care about Betty the checker and wanted to know how her grandkids were doing this week.
Me neither. I just want a business to get my stuff done in a standard way. Clear pricing upfront and no haggling. No surprise. If I hire someone to take care my yard, then take care of the yard. The price is reasonable. The plants thrive. The lawn is green. The irrigation system just works and does not leak. Connection, what connection?
What is the standard way? There are details which requires having a conversation and a relationship.
I certainly don't want a service to come early morning and wake up my kids or in the afternoon polluting the whole neighborhood with noise and fumes when I want to spend time outside.
Well, there's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn2933vMylY
An "accountability sink" [0] where a major feature of the system or machien is to try to disclaim any responsibility and cast blame into the void.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
If I was getting 8 $ burritos with clearly marked ingredients and total automation end to end, I would gladly work with such a variant of Chipotle as well, even if it cuts workforce by 80% in such a scenario.
Frivolous employment maximisation with words like human connection do not make sense for survival necessities. It works better with discretionary spending
Note that for the businesses mentioned in the article, the service is the product.
I don't care about service at a gas station - I want to fill my tank, pay, and get out. It's different when I take it to the mechanic - it's a rather old car, and I appreciate them talking intelligently about what the options are and what repairs they would suggest.
Definitely! One exemple is Grab, in all Southeast Asia: what people like is that the app is fluid, and will get you from A to B.
There is no marketing like Uber did sometimes of like: "personal service, free water bottle", and it's still killing it.
Of course, I personally always enjoy a chat with the driver, but many people I know prefer actually not talking.
The grab app shows un-skippable ads. And some taxis even have ads "based on your interests" playing on a TV in front of your seat. I found their "no marketing" ;) to be almost too much.
I choose Grab mainly because I always have installed for GrabPay payments. Sometimes I use Gojek (often unloaded because my phone doesn't have much storage) because it's cheaper.
I avoid first-party taxi apps because they're shit and do dumb stuff like charge a 10% surcharge for credit card payments. They could get away with it 20 years ago, but I'm so glad Uber, Grab, and all the others are eating their lunch.
Or Gojek!
This is the difference between the people on this site broadly and everyone else broadly.
I want a connection to quality products that last until they wear out (or are obsolete). Customer service is part of quality.
i love connecting with a bookseller at a local independent bookstore. or a bartender. or a server. etc. such a more interesting life if you connect with people at the businesses in your community
> I want transactional interactions that actually work.
One of the great lies of the modern world is that this actually happens.
I dunno, I talk to the Doordash bot, it gives me a refund for the failed delivery because it didn't score me as doing fraud, I don't care there was no human involved. It's certainly an upgrade over the menu-driven approach that has no room for deviation.
Yea, on the same note I've had to call the cable company for internet outages a few times recently and the AI system handled the situation well. A few times it was neighborhood outages that it saw. One other time the system reset the modem configuration and the system came up, and one time it saw the interface on the modem was receiving errors and switched me over to a human to send a truck.
It really was much better than most cable related tech calls I've had.
>> I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.
I do want a connection. Because connection is what ensures that the transactional interactions continue to work outside of the "happy path". Connection is what ensures that you can return those expensive headphones you bought because extended use makes your neck hurt, even though the return window has passed.
i dont know. I love basic humanity in my interactions. Thats why i eat at chick-fil-a and get coffee at starbucks. Not mcdonalds and dunkin donuts.
Just make it pleasant and human.
An AI written post talking about the importance of human connection in the age of AI is hilarious.
I had read 80% of the post and loved it. Then I came to see few comments - Saw yours and now having difficulty reading further. That means:
1. AI has gotten better - or eventually most people would like reading AI generated content 2. Author is just using AI to post-process - content is original
Anyway I did love the content.
I feel like the author wrote like the full plan/ substance himself, and gave to an AI the formatting. It's quite fine for me so actually, as long as the substance make sense/is logical.
What about the formatting seems indicative of AI generation? It just looks like normal long-form writing to me.
The intro section reeks of LLM slop:
> He called the restaurant. He was put on hold for thirty minutes. When someone finally answered, they were apologetic but firm — the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door.
If that was written by a human, it's embarrassing.
I can only speak for myself here, but if I feel like I've read a whole paragraph that should have been half a sentence, that's my signal there's possibly AI generated content in there
I normally have conversation with opus - And I enjoy it. Maybe I am getting fine-tuned.
I have definitely noticed other people using LLM-choice words, myself included, more frequently. It's a strange phenomenon to witness. Obviously the models got them from us first so there must've been some popularity there prior, but the boost is clear. Blast radius, load-bearing, shape, and so on. Or maybe they were always there and my confirmation bias is in high gear.
One I've started noticing is the "quotation marks around a phrase awkwardly trying to bundle a concept" thing. Like all LLM cliches it's something that has been used in writing for a long time, but I've seen it so much more recently. I think lots of people have picked this up from seeing LLMs use it. But like you said, who knows.
I do have a sneaking suspicion it's a mix of things, I'm at the point now that I do get a bit of an odd feeling whenever I'm reading AI produced content
I suspect over time it will get good enough that I'll need a larger sample size to identify it, however that won't solve what I think of as the "why does this need to exist" problem, I've noticed that a fair bit of AI content hits that mark, it can be fun, but I've not experienced that feeling of engaging with something that's been well thought out / executed, maybe we'll hit that point[0], but I suspect it will take a while
-[0]: https://xkcd.com/810/
I'm always curious what types of books people like when they say they liked reading AI, so what were the last few books you've fully read + enjoyed?
Yep https://www.pangram.com/history/d3fd8f73-af8a-4cdb-968e-7346...
How does Pangram detect this? How do we know this is any more reliable than just asking any HN user to judge a text for AI signs, i.e. how is this more authoritative than the comments you're responding to?
https://www.pangram.com/research/how-it-works
> How do we know this
We don't. Pangram is HN's astrology. It has 99.99% accuracy (according to Pangram.)
They claim it has a very low false-positive rate, which is meaningfully more nuanced than "accuracy".
"Detect AI-generated content with 99.98% accuracy." -pangram themselves
Oops… gotta say that I agree with the general message of the article, though.
Why do you agree?
> Here’s where I get frustrated, and this is the part of the article I’ve rewritten three times.
This was the chaotic evil part.
Since I couldn't be bothered, I had AI read it and tell me the outcome: they did in fact go to online-only bookings, freeing the staff from the phones so they could help customers more.
Even though they were fully booked from the phone bookings regardless
I always wonder how people can tell. For this particular article, was it the thirty-four occurrences of em dashes with spaces on either side? Something else obvious?
It is the em dashes and the excessive wordiness as well as a lot of "not this, but that".
Eg:
"Not dramatically. Just quietly. " -- This is filler words. Whether it's dramatic or quiet has no relevance to the point they're making.
It also loves threes: "Well-modelled, properly sourced, beautifully visualised to requirements" - again, all irrelevant. The point they're making is that it's measuring the wrong thing, not that "beautifully visual things can be incorrect".
"There’s a piece of this conversation that most leaders miss, and it’s the part I care about most" - this hook of "most people miss" it is very common in AI writing.
The tiny sentence fragments are too much for me. They trip up the flow of the text.
Also the "not this, but that" structure is overused here.
It was the content. So many very specific claims with no source, just stuff being made up. I don't know who Brené Brown is, perhaps she specifically researches trust, but how curious that her daughter can raise a problem with trust, specifically cite two named behaviours that build trust, and then Brown just happens to have a database of trust-building behaviours to hand, that she hasn't even analysed, ready to output a teachable moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brené_Brown
I am not sure if you posted a brilliant, subtle joke... or if you're demonstrating the exact behavior that you suggest is a flag of inauthenticity.
This particular article has the tell tale opus 4.8 smell of these short sentences. I think its mainly opus 4.8
When did "X is built one marble at a time" become popular? Maybe search analytics can tell us.
Well, this isn't what I expected. (And it only goes up to 2022.) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=one+marble+at+...
This one almost feels like the AI got stuck in a perseverating loop of "He <blank> the <blank>." <repeat>
This is followed up by a sprinkling of every possible punctuative shakeup: bold, em-dash, semicolon, colon, quote, etc.
I personally thought to myself "written by AI" after this part:
... the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door. In trying to humanise the process, he’d made it worse.
I'm sure some people write this way, but most don't. And AI writes this way.
Articles of this type suggest a fun game: "LLM or Marketroid?" Because either one could have written it, and both are capable of about equivalent levels of original thought. (whoops did i just say that out loud)
Well, sometimes there's flat-out nonsense that seems to have been written purely to back into the author's thesis:
But usually there's also:- Word count hovering between four and five thousand words - Dramatic/narrative section titles - "No X, no Y. Just Z"
Last but certainly not least, there's the Lists of Exactly Three Things. I counted literally thirty in this piece. Examples:
(As a non-native speaker) I didn’t notice that, I love this post and even shared it with my team
Not sure if AI slop, or LI (LinkedIn) slop...
This is great advice, as long as you remember you need both hospitality and service. At some point a warm relationship doesn’t compensate enough for a bad product.
I love that the staff at my little neighborhood bank remembers me, and was so warm and helpful when I had to open an estate account when my mom died, and sometimes I bring my favorite teller a latte on my way back from the coffee shop.
But I still switched my business account to Chase, because my little neighborhood bank’s website is stuck in about 2005, and I just couldn’t put up with it any longer!
Maybe what's also important is that the hospitality "relationship" grows on both sides and the customer has an understanding why the staff knows them.
I'm a regular at a few coffee shops near my home and I know the staff there "know" me - it's enough to have a pleasant conversation sometimes. But that works, because we have gotten to the "familiar face" part over a longer period and at the same time.
What the restaurant owner wants is that his staff somehow treat everyone like a regular and have spirited conversations about their life events, even if they just entered the restaurant for the first time.
The staff might even be able to pull that off, with a hefty dose of online profiling - but even then, I cannot see how anyone who isn't a completely detached business type wouldn't find this extremely creepy.
> He called the restaurant. He was put on hold for thirty minutes. When someone finally answered, they were apologetic but firm — the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door.
> In trying to humanise the process, he’d made it worse.
> Here’s where most stories would end with “so they moved everything online and fired the reservation staff.” That’s not what happened. They did move to online booking, but they kept the entire reservation team and repurposed them. These people now spent their days learning about the customers coming in that night. Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?
I have questions...
a) how does moving to online reservations help with "it's fully booked" if it's booked even before then?
b) what was "the entire reservation team" even doing that a phone call takes 30min to service and then just results in "nope we're full"?
In a lot of businesses, online reservations or tickets are scalper-prone, so I can absolutely see a desire to avoid that, and would be fully supportive of moving those things to phone or in-person. But that doesn't seem to be the case here, the story is just "He wanted the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised."
Which is plausible enough, but the details don't seem to add up. Is it even a true story? (Or is it the sort of plausible-but-internally-inconsistent thing you might get if you told an LLM to generate such a story about a restaurant?)
There are still a lot of old people that love calling places and havent/won't get the hang of online systems.
Also restaurants of all sorts seem to have no one dedicated to answering the phone any longer. It's really problematic when you are trying to set up larger parties (9 to 12 people for example) at the last minute, which many places can handle but the online system won't do any more than 8 and there is no way to reach them other than messaging that may take a day.
It is AI generated.
For many businesses, AI is a mechanism to try to keep costs lower because the value of money is decreasing more and more. So if we don't implement AI and the business can't cut costs elsewhere? what's going to happen? There's going to be demand destruction and a potential lower quality of life.
As I see it there's are two directions with AI
Most firms have a backlog of features and design debt that AI can help address.One thing I have a question: what about business that doesn't have hospitaly/B2C? Many exemples relies on the F&B business, which is quite special in the fact that one of the core value proposition is directly hospitality, so we could argue that "adding more hospitality" is actually their core business already.
But what about a company which is more in B2B, and where procurement will be more rationalized (e.g RFP, which is often regulated)?
One thing as well: this is moat from an organization point of view, but unfortunately not for the individual: soft skills are often easier to get than hard skills, and there is so already a competition on the job market for the client-facing roles, even before AI arrival: like Sales / Business Developers / Account Managers (or more internal roles to try to build something that the client would need, like Product Managers)
> Every guest walked in to find someone who knew them — not in a creepy, surveillance-state way, but in the way a good friend remembers what you’re going through.
...said every company that does creepy surveillance ever.
Why can't AI replicate that?
Because it's not reliable enough to let it do anything which might cost the service provider. This is the cost of hallucinations. You can't let the customer service AI issue refunds, or upgrade someone to a better room. Not yet, anyway. Agentic AI systems with any real power generate minor disasters on a regular basis.
I rarely want that but for special occasions I love it
The staff at The French Laundry did this extremely well
They watched us before arrival and maybe stalked us online before that to have relevant things to talk about and ensure our experience was great
Now I can accept that from a 3 michelin star restuarant, but I dont want anybody else doing that
> If every company uses the same AI tools to optimise the same metrics, the optimisation itself becomes commodity. Everyone has the same chatbot, the same personalisation engine, the same churn predictor. The floor rises for everyone simultaneously, which means relative advantage disappears. The only remaining differentiator — the actual moat — becomes the irreducibly human: genuine empathy in a crisis, a person who actually cares, a brand that feels run by real people who listen.
Yes, this is what every article proclaiming AI will be the end for human jobs completely misses. Ultimately businesses must compete and things that become scarce or harder to attain, such as human connection, will become their real differentiator. Businesses are still selling to humans at the end of the day.
This article was great and provides a lot of wonderful examples of how to build high touch businesses. It reminds me a lot of Delivering Happiness by the late Tony Hsieh and his experiences building a high touch culture for Zappos to differentiate with the ecommerce businesses he was up against who all resorted to bad customer support, poor return experiences. A famous example being Tony calling into Zappos' support line pretending to be a customer ordering a pizza as a joke, and his customer support actually caring enough to ensure a pizza was delivered to him. Probably a book more relevant than ever
Don’t make up restaurant anecdotes if you’ve never worked in a restaurant. (Or, in this case, have your favorite chat bot do it.) A white collar worker could eat 3 meals per day in restaurants and still, very deliberately, have no idea what makes them tick. Even the fanciest restaurants operate nothing like a tech company. You just end up looking ridiculous to the bazillion people who have worked in them.
I'm genuinely trying to cut down on complaining about slop writing, but how are you going to say:
...right after you've subjected me to four thousand(!) words of preachy BS about connecting with humans instead of taking shortcuts?Let me say it again because I'm really getting sick of recent blog word count inflation: if you publish four thousand words on some topic, you better be an expert, a strong writer, whatever. Find a better reason than SEO to go over 1500 words.
I agree. AI and some of these type of digital platforms are making interactions more efficient, maybe ..less costly but efficiency isn’t the same thing as a real connection. Instead of investing in AI/digitization maybe it's better to invest in employee training and growth.