If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

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2024-07-11 12:00:06

About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine.

But as you can see around 7/7 on that graph, the 100 Mbps went down to about eight, and that's the point where my wife starts noticing how slow the Internet is. Action level.

Except AT&T's AI-powered chatbot seems to have a fiendish tendency to equate 'WiFi' with 'Internet', no doubt due to so many people thinking they are one and the same.

I'll cut to the chase—after repeating some variation of that about 8 times, eventually I got queued up in the 20 minute line to a human support rep.

Unfortunately for me, the human support rep, like so many in the industry, promptly ignored the data I provided in my first chat message to him2, and told me switching WiFi channels on the device (on which WiFi is currently disabled completely) would solve my issue. At no cost.