Before the advent of ChatGPT, there was an AI startup who had a chatbot named Annie, whose role was to help people looking for rental properties find an apartment suited to their preferences and book appointments for ocular visits. However, the chatbot wasn't sophisticated enough to handle the different situations clients were facing. So, the company hired human writers to operate the chatbot whenever Annie encountered an inquiry that was not part of her algorithm. Through machine learning, the engineers had hoped that Annie would become advanced enough to render human help unnecessary. And so writer Irina Teveleva's life as an AI chatbot operator began.
As anyone who has been into the real-estate business before or went looking for apartments themselves, each prospective client have their own situations that require a tailored approach. So, operators had to give Annie that human touch, to be able to relate with the clients, and to sound as human as possible. The idea was that clients were more at ease when they believed they were talking to humans. However, along the way, the AI startup was bought by a real-estate software firm, and directions shifted. Instead of trying to make Annie sound as human as possible, operators were instructed to be as efficient possible. In the end, Annie had succeeded in doing what humans generally fear about AI - she rendered them unnecessary.
(Image credit: Mohamed Hassan/Pixabay)