The Absurdity of AI

On my other blog I wrote an overview of Zendesk Relate earlier this week. While describing the Enhanced Ticket Comments feature, I joked about an absurd flow that could happen:

The whole idea of generated emails like Google does, or now Zendesk, still feels a bit weird to me. I keep thinking we'll end up in an absurd scenario where:

1. Customer has an issue and writes a three sentence email and uses ChatGPT to expand that into three paragraphs of text.
2. Zendesk receives email and an agent uses Zendesk AI to turn email into three sentence summary
3. Agent replies in three lines and uses Zendesk AI to turn it into three paragraphs of text
4. Customer receives reply and uses ChatGPT to summarise the reply. into three short lines again.

With a lot of wasted bits in the middle and some nuances getting lost in translation. But I understand the benefits too. We all wrote that short email at 4:55PM before we leave the office which could have been a nicer written email when you reread it the day after.

Coincidentally, during a conversation with Google's Sundar Pichai, The Verge's Nilay Patel described a similar future:

Do you think, even in that airline case, there’s an element of it that’s programmatic, where, if you say the right words to the airline customer service agent, you might get a refund, and the AI might know those right words, and that airline might say, “Look, we’re going to have an AI just scanning emails for these correct words and giving refunds,” and that might actually be the loop? - Nilay Patel

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The VergeNilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, host of the Decoder podcast, and co-host of The Vergecast.