Automated Garbage

I just had a horrible experience and it stirred a lot up in my head, regarding a matter that many people are quite concerned about these days, with good reason. AI. I could talk about AI for hours, but will stick to this one point that is spinning around my mind at the moment. 

AI can be incredibly helpful for me in certain regards. I use it to help with  enlargements, photoshop edits, even basic information gathering about my printers. In fact I thought I needed a major overhaul on one machine last week and Chat GPT guided me to a solution that I just wasn’t seeing. 

Yes it is realistic that AI will kill millions of jobs. It’s already happening. People will still work, things will just change, but change is scary. 

One thing I know, as my entire business model is based on it, is people want and need human support and connection. That will never go away. People support my business because when they contact my business, they get me, not an automated system (plus I’m pretty good at what I do). I work on EVERY single image that comes out of my shop. My eyes see them all. Im not focused on the next order, I’m focused on the order in front of me. 

This morning I had an issue with Shopify re billing my account as I had forgotten to cancel it. So I reached out to them for support. Well I tried. 

This all began for me with the automated phone systems. When you call many businesses you get a machine that gives you a list of buttons to push, because that company doesn’t want to pay for a human to answer the phone like they used to. Now every one of them says “We are experiencing very high call volume so please be patient”. It’s the worst. 

Fast forward to 6am this morning when I saw that my card was charged. I tried to cancel and get support while still in bed but the app and the browser simply would not work. I kept pushing the requested button, and nothing happened. My anxiety shot through the roof. Rather than relax in bed and have some morning coffee, I got up angry and rushed to work. Yes this was my choice. I could have ignored it until I got to work, but, well, emotions can get the best of us sometimes. 

When I got to work I began the next battle in getting in touch with a human on the other end of my digital line. During this process Shopify’s awful AI bot told me repeatedly that they have a strict “no refund” policy. I imagine most people give up at this point. But not me. Many of my clients use Shopify so I moved forward. 

About an hour later, after two browsers and countless attempts, I got a human. They happily refunded my account. I was relieved but it also frustrated me even further that they made it that hard. Of course they did on purpose, because most people probably don’t have the patience to push as hard as I did. They wanted to save a buck so in return they wasted hours of my time, which they don’t give a damn about.

This is when the revelation came to my mind. People HATE this shit. They hate these experiences. They hate automated systems. So many people are scared of AI taking their jobs, but I think more business owners and employees should be looking at the advantage. If we keep this garbage OUT of our business, customers will flock to us when the competition utilizes it. I will never use a bot to automate anything I do at my shop. Mark my words. And as more of my competitors try to increase profits by using these systems, more people will want to find alternatives where they don’t have to. I look forward to being a place for those people to go. 

Something that has been pounded in my head over the past few years is to take the situation as it is. Im not going to fight AI as it comes. I don’t have the energy. But I can adjust my life and how I run my shop and what businesses I support based on what I feel is not only ethical but how I would want my experience to be as a consumer. Not focusing on increasing profits but focusing on the experience. And let’s see where I land! It’s working so far!

Thanks for your support!