On one hand, some fields are sufficiently low-stakes (and low-standards) that replacing call centers with LLMs would be an unambiguous improvement, even if they occasionally hallucinated. I spent a year or so wrestling with Comcast because one call center worker claimed to have canceled my subscription but actually hadn’t, and buried it somewhere it didn’t show up on normal inspection, resulting in my being subtly double-billed for months on end. I can’t imagine that Claude Opus 4.8 would do a worse job, on average.
On the other, pharmacies and anything handling prescriptions should either be staffed by a verifiable, old-school, flowchart-based telephone bot or by the pharmacist himself. Neither LLMs nor sketchy call centers are trustworthy enough to deal with sensitive medical information and proper handling of prescriptions.
I imagine a system where you start with a basic model that just reads through the script (the same way a low-end tech support employee would be expected to), but you get forwarded to a better model if that doesn’t work[1].
Or if you jailbreak it into sending you to a human specialist, which would require SOTA knowledge on what works for that and what doesn’t, limiting the number of specialists you’d need and commensurately increasing quality. Sort of like this old XKCD comic, except real.
The problem with backdoors is that all it takes is someone to go blabbing about it and then everyone knows and you’re back to square one. What would be a game changer is if you had, say, a personal AI that could provide attestation for its user’s skill level, but that comes with privacy concerns… Yeah, I’m not convinced my solution is better, actually.
On one hand, some fields are sufficiently low-stakes (and low-standards) that replacing call centers with LLMs would be an unambiguous improvement, even if they occasionally hallucinated. I spent a year or so wrestling with Comcast because one call center worker claimed to have canceled my subscription but actually hadn’t, and buried it somewhere it didn’t show up on normal inspection, resulting in my being subtly double-billed for months on end. I can’t imagine that Claude Opus 4.8 would do a worse job, on average.
On the other, pharmacies and anything handling prescriptions should either be staffed by a verifiable, old-school, flowchart-based telephone bot or by the pharmacist himself. Neither LLMs nor sketchy call centers are trustworthy enough to deal with sensitive medical information and proper handling of prescriptions.
Do you expect the call centers to be using Claude Opus 4.8? Imo you’d be lucky to have Sonnet.
I imagine a system where you start with a basic model that just reads through the script (the same way a low-end tech support employee would be expected to), but you get forwarded to a better model if that doesn’t work[1].
Or if you jailbreak it into sending you to a human specialist, which would require SOTA knowledge on what works for that and what doesn’t, limiting the number of specialists you’d need and commensurately increasing quality. Sort of like this old XKCD comic, except real.
The problem with backdoors is that all it takes is someone to go blabbing about it and then everyone knows and you’re back to square one. What would be a game changer is if you had, say, a personal AI that could provide attestation for its user’s skill level, but that comes with privacy concerns… Yeah, I’m not convinced my solution is better, actually.