I’m wary of “can hardly make things worse” types of arguments for anything that involves large scale social changes. There are few complex problems that can’t be made worse. Working gradually towards desired outcomes seems like a more reasonable approach.
My interest in this comes from having worked as a customer support representative. I feel a sense of kinship with the millions of people around the world who are doing similar jobs. Seeing “customer support representative” near the top of lists of jobs that are expected to be impacted by AI is concerning. Note that people from marginalized groups are heavily represented in the customer support workforce.
That sounds like a poorly structured support system. The level 1 group doesn’t necessarily need to be able to solve your problem. What they need to be able to do is understand and empathize with your problem and be motivated to see that it gets resolved.
Discourse is in a position to be a leader in terms of how AI gets integrated into customer support systems. I don’t have much to contribute to that, other than to try to highlight the role of human understanding, empathy, and motivation in customer support work. LLMs can mimic these attributes to some degree, but from my point of view, that is not an appropriate use of the technology.
From a customer’s point of view, to loosely quote Sam Altman (from memory), “no one likes being condescended to by a computer.”** Having LLM support agents attempt to mimic human concern is going to lead to customer frustration.
This is getting off topic from the question about how LLMs will impact forums. If there’s going to be a continued discussion about how Discourse powered customer support systems could be enhanced with AI, it should probably be moved to a separate topic.
** Edit: thinking about it some more, I believe the Sam Altman quote may have been closer to “no one likes being scolded by a machine.” Note that my making this correction is an example of how human motivation often serves a corrective function.