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Comment by suzzer99 | Hacker News Reader

> What matters isn't that an AI "make connections", it's that the AI generates some text that causes a human to make the connections.

This has been true since Waze and Google maps first came out. Some of the suggestions were like "Huh, I never thought of going that way... hey this works... good job Waze!" and some were like "No Waze, I'm not going to try to cross eight lanes of free-flowing traffic at rush hour."

What sucks is when an AI bot hallucinates some transgression and bans you from a monopoly marketplace for life, with no human recourse. Ask me how I know.

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> What sucks is when an AI bot hallucinates some transgression and bans you from a monopoly marketplace for life, with no human recourse. Ask me how I know.

This is fundamentally an incentive problem. Whether MegaCorp reaches this decision through an AI or a team of people who made a mistake, interpreted a rule differently than intended, missed context, whatever, they have been allowed to set up the system in a way which has all the incentives in their favor. They don’t need you and further, helping you costs them money. Yet we allow them to be the only game in town and still say it’s at their convenience to give you service.

The focus in the modern world needs to be on re-incentivizing companies to do the right things, AI or otherwise.

I think we need some kind of legislation that any kind of death penalty from a monopoly marketplace can't be carried out without a face-to-face appeal with a live human being.

That’d certainly be a good step, but I think it still only incentives them to hear you out. Since in this case you would have demonstrated to them that you were a customer that risks costing them money (in the form of this appeal if nothing else) they’re still incentivized to not do business with you if given the option.

Even in the case of something like a credit card company where it’s not technically a monopoly, you risk them all coming to the same conclusion.

Essential for-profit service combined with at-will service is simply a recipe for failure.

I wasn't a customer. I wrote a book and tried to publish it on KDP, Amazon's digital publishing wing. A bot hallucinated that my eBook was plagiarizing my paperback (well yeah, it's the same book) and suspended my account.

All appeals were denied with increasingly vague language, either by more bots, or humans with strong incentive to just rubber stamp the bot's decision and move on. I'll never know which.

It's all here in this pamphlet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40992654

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