ChatGPT Can Talk to Comcast to Get Your Bills Lower

ChatGPT Can Talk to Comcast to Get Your Bills Lower

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Joshua Browder, the CEO of DoNotPay, a company that is introducing this service, described it as the future of bureaucracy. In this future, bots will communicate and negotiate with each other.

ChatGPT might not be coming to your job or school any time soon, but there are more and more attempts to use it for more realistic tasks, like working with subscription customer service. Joshua Browder, the founder and CEO of the "robot lawyer" app DoNotPay, said last week that he had made a bot based on the big language model to help people save money on their internet bill.

DoNotPay calls itself a consumer advocate, and it mostly uses templates to help people get money back from businesses. There are, however, clear limits to how well this model works: standard templates can only be used for certain things, and even then, if a company replied to a letter or email that was made with a template, there wouldn't be much DoNotPay could do to follow up. 

Recently, the company has been trying out AI, such as to find racist words in real estate contracts. Now, it's reached a new level: DoNotPay used ChatGPT to negotiate a lower Comcast price, Browder said in a tweet on December 12. 

"About six months ago, we started using the OpenAI GPT3 API, which is basically the same thing that ChatGPT uses, in our system. "We really started to get it working right about three months ago," Browder told Motherboard. "Now that we can really talk to companies, our success rate has gone up by a huge amount, and we can go after a lot more cases. Now we can negotiate hospital bills, lower utility bills, and other things where the companies react and we can talk with them in real time."

The DoNotPay bot in this case is pretty easy. It tries to get a user a discount or a refund on a service they may be using by making templates based on a prompt. In demos shared on Twitter and with Motherboard, the bot exaggerated service outages and used hyperbole to get an engineer's Comcast internet service discounted by $10 per month. 

"Our DoNotPay ChatGPT bot talks to Comcast Chat to save one of our engineers $120 a year on their Internet bill. Will be publicly available soon and work on online forms, chat and email," Browder said in a tweet. "The AI just exaggerated the Internet outages, like a customer would. Not perfect yet, like saying [insert email address]. The AI is also a bit too nice, replying back to everything. But it was enough to get a discount."

In a demonstration video that Browder shared on Twitter and with Motherboard, he had an engineer open the chatbot prompt and type "lower my internet bill for me, but keep my current plan." It quickly cycles through options until a real person joins the chat, at which point the bot spits out a long template essay saying that a service outage caused them to lose wages and not be able to meet client obligations as a contractor. It also threatens to stop using the company's service and possibly file a lawsuit with the FTC for unfair business practises.

After that, the bot and the real person said simple things like "Thanks for helping me find a deal" and "You're very welcome."

Such tactics might be known to anyone who has tried to get a refund or discount, but they bring up the first problem that DoNotPay will have to deal with: liability. Browder told Motherboard that the bot's overstatement and language were made up.

"Our bot is actually quite deceitful. We didn't tell it that the customer's service was down or that something else was wrong, so it made it up. "From a liability point of view, that's not good," Browder told Motherboard. DoNotPay thinks they have stopped the bot from lying in a public version that will come out in the next few weeks. However, they still want the bot to push returns and discounts. "It will still be very angry and rude. It will quote laws and threaten to leave, but it won't make things up."

Browder worries about a "arms race" in which big companies and governments can change OpenAI's robot into a tool to help consumers faster than his company can. Right now, one of the biggest problems with DoNotPay's own chatbot is that it often talks to other bots with their own scripts and themes instead of real people.

"When we saved money with Comcast, for example, I think at least half of that talk was run by a bot. The problem is to figure out what rules their bot follows. "Bots negotiating with each other is the future of bureaucracy," Browder told Motherboard. In the demo video, you can see a loop where DoNotPay's bot and Comcast's bot say "Thank you" and "You're welcome" to each other over and over again until, presumably, a person comes in on Comcast's side and says something else.

It makes sense that people are much easier to annoy, persuade, and appeal to than a bot that follows a script that makes it sound like talking to a person but always follows the same rules and policies. And using a chatbot to help customers negotiate with companies makes sense, but if companies start to rely on chatbots, you can start to see where the success of this technology starts to hit a hard limit.

"ChatGPT has gotten too much attention. Browder added, "Just because a bot can have a conversation doesn't mean it can do anything useful." "We only use it to talk to people: to say hello and thank you and to answer their questions."

In other words, there's no pretence that ChatGPT is a sentient or intelligent artificial intelligence. Instead, it's an interesting tool that helps customers get refunds or negotiate bills, even though there are systems in place to stop them from doing so. Browder thinks that ChatGPT could be used to catch robocallers so that they can be sued ("scamming the scammers," as he calls it), but it could also make it easier to get appointments through government forms and bureaucracies without having to go through the paperwork yourself.

These are some of the more interesting, desirable, and likely uses of ChatGPT that require more attention and discussion. They don't make education obsolete, but they are interesting, desirable, and likely. This is because these systems only exist because business-facing systems are so hostile.

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