Artificial Stupidity

published 2026-05-01

by Christopher Howard

Some people are worried about generative AI becoming so smart that it takes over the world and tries to execute humanity. How they can believe this, while at the same time critically examining the output being produced by generative AI, is beyond me. In any case, I think a much more plausible dystopian story is that we hand all the control of our lives, and everything we depend on, over to AI, only to realize that it is incapable of pulling off the job. But at that point it is too late.

Recently this issue came home to me, when I needed to purchase an expensive oven part. As you might know, I'm not fond of Javascript, the Big Web, or doing business through Web portals. In the past I've had a good experience using searspartsdirect.com, which allowed placing orders over the phone, although this did cause you to miss out on a small discount they were offering for Web-only customers. So, I called up the company like normal, and worked my way through the phone tree, only to find, at the tip of the branch, a message stating that the company is no longer providing orders over the phone, and that it is necessary to go to searspartsdirect.com to place an order. I was bummed, but I still needed my part, so I spun up the Web page.

A few minute later, after unblocking JavaScript from ten different sites including cloudfront and paypal, the item was in my cart and I worked through the checkout steps. Everything being filled in, I hit submit. But instead of the usual success message or order confirmation, I just got a vague payment error message. Hmm, something wrong with my card? I tried a few other things, such as clearing out my cache and cookies, and placing the order again, but with the same result.

I decided to call up the company and see if they could help me work through the problem. Guess what? After working through the phone tree, I discovered that OTP support is not available either! At least as best as I could tell from trying multiple branches of the phone tree.

I go back to the Web portal, trying to contact the company through that. The support agent turns out to be an AI bot, a very unhelpful one. The AI bot is unable to see any order under my name or phone number and doesn't understand what the problem is. I ask to speak to a human. The bot says that it will connect me to a human, but only if I explain what the problem is first. I do my best to summarize. Afterwards, the bot gets stuck in this loop where it keeps telling me, over and over again, that it stands ready to assist, if only I will provide more details on what the problem is. When I finally shut down the bot in disgust, it asks me to complete a survey on how well it did. One out of five stars, of course. Ironically, it asks me why I gave such a low rating, and one of the options I can select is "could not connect to a human".

It gets worse: I go to buy the part from a different company, only to discover that my card — which is a pre-paid card — doesn't have enough funds to complete the transaction. After calling up my bank, I discover that the money is currently held in a pending transaction to searspartsdirect.com. So, the money is locked up, but I have no order or order confirmation. Apparently, the way things work is that I cannot actually dispute a transaction until it goes from pending to posted. Also, only the merchant can cancel a pending transaction!

I tried to explain the situation to the bank agent as best I could, but she would only tell me, over and over again, that the only way to resolve my issue was to wait until the transaction is posted, and that only the merchant can get the transaction posted, and that I needed to communicate with the merchant to get the transaction canceled. But what if I they don't post the transaction? Does the pending transaction expire eventually? How long does that take? The bank agent wouldn't (couldn't?) answer that question, so eventually I had to hang up in defeat.

Wait... what if... the bank agent is an AI bot? 😱

Copyright

CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed