Artificial Stupidity

AI came close to ruining my Monday, rendering a consumer product shopping expedition Kafkaesque. It wasn’t funny, but I still might have the last laugh.

See, my refrigerator started to give up the ghost last week. The fridge became reluctant to cool even though the freezer was working fine. I called a recommended appliance repairman who wanted $165 to come and look at it. Parts and additional labor would be extra, of course. Since the fridge was fairly old and had given me trouble before, I decided it might not be worth having him come over, only to potentially end up paying half the cost of a new fridge.

So I put cold packs in the food compartments and started looking for a new refrigerator. I like to buy local, but usually end up going to Best Buy for major purchases. Their prices are competitive, and most of their their floor people are patient, helpful, and pretty well informed.

Finding no more suitable ones or better deals online, I visited a Best Buy 30 minutes away. (It’s against my principles to turn to Amazon for anything I can get elsewhere.) I needed a fridge that would fit our cabinetry, was big enough, and could be delivered promptly. I settled on one with a top freezer that was in stock. As it and all fridges are made in China, I felt lucky that tariffs hadn’t jacked up the price, which was still a hefty $850, tax included. Free delivery was available the following week.

I didn’t buy it at the store. At home, after thinking it over I finalized the purchase online. I used a credit card from our credit union, as usual. But Best Buy said there was a problem with it, and please try another payment method. So I entered a debit card from my checking account. It too was rejected. That made me resort to my spouse’s Amex card that I rarely use, but its numbers did not compute. Turned out she had had it reissued and didn’t tell me.

As my blood pressure started to climb, I received a text alert from the credit union asking if I had made a purchase for $850 at Best Buy. I tried replying Yes but my phone failed to send the message. For some reason it objects to replying to alerts.

So I called my credit union and got routed by a robot to their fraud line, which was answered by a man with a heavy accent. He asked me if I had made that purchase. I said I had. Then about one six weeks ago, which I said I couldn’t remember. Maybe my wife had made it. Upon my reply, he said they would deactivate my card and issue a new one. I pleaded not to do that, and when he couldn’t or wouldn’t comply, I told him I wanted to speak with his supervisor.

A woman came on the line, also with an accent. Turns out she wasn’t a supervisor, so I insisted on talking with hers. After she redialed, I found myself back talking to the same robot I’d started with. Seems like a likely consequence of what AI people call “unsupervised learning.”

Shortly a robot called from my bank, asking about my attempted purchase with their debit card, which they had declined. After a brief Q&A, I was able to convince it that the purchase was valid and was told the hold would be removed from my card. 

After that, I went back to my shopping cart and tried PayPal. This time it worked, and I was able to direct payment to my checking account. I was annoyed I couldn’t use my credit card and get 850 points for my troubles, but at least the purchase went through.

But the next day, Paypal notified me that my bank had refused payment. As well it should have, because I had mistakenly told PayPal to use my business account, which had insufficient funds.

I was annoyed, but wasn’t sure what to do. So I waited for Best Buy to say something about it, as I didn’t want to re-order while my current one was still active.

The next day, someone from Best Buy called to make delivery arrangements. How strange. Best Buy doesn’t know it got stiffed and I’m not about to tell it. It can damn well sort it out and tell me what to do. Maybe it has an AI to take care of such things.

All this trouble started with AI. Even though it might know I’ve bought a number of items from them with the same credit card, some stupid artificial agent decided it couldn’t be me. This is just one little way in which AIs, which were supposed to be our willing slaves, have become our capricious masters. Of course, there are so many stolen numbers and attempts to use them out there that the card issuers have to be especially prudent. As fraud and the need to detect it escalate, the algorithms grow more stringent and more apt to cancel cards. Because it costs money to take these measures, it costs money for them to eat bogus charges they can’t trace, and of course it costs money to consumers who’ve had their credit compromised and paid for things they never bought.

And time, like I spent dealing with this mess. This is my biggest beef with high tech, after having it tell me how I have to live: It steals my time, diverting potentially productive waking hours to the care and feeding of systems and devices we use, like waiting on hold to reach tech support when the AI we chat with is clueless. And attention, when we are forced to learn how to fix glitches in our equipment and software and have to reach tech support when we can’t.

When I asked ChatGPT3 “Do credit card companies us AI to detect fraud, and if so in what way?” one of the things it told me was AIs consider “user’s typical behavior patterns (AI learns what’s “normal” for each user).” I guess other than having shopped at Best Buy dozens of times, it wasn’t my “normal” pattern to make a big purchase there. But it also told me that AIs can makes wrongly flag purchases for any number of reasons. I knew that.

Joseph Weizenbaum, one of the founders of AI turned critic (see this post), said AI is good at calculation but has terrible judgment. And yet it’s used to steer vehicles, pick military targets, deny credit, rate auto drivers, and interpret current events. Beyond its frequent failures, it stupefies us, wastes our time, and usurps our competence. As Philip Barrington’s odd adventure novel asks, who okayed this?

Not me.

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