Future? I could swear it's already happening. Talking to support workers is getting very cringe worthy. Every other sentence is some superficial crap like
"Hello there, It's great to hear from you and I hope you're doing well today! I will be happy to assist you!"
I didn't make this up, this is a real message I got from a support team.
This isn't Japan-specific, and retail jobs basically anywhere in the world are similarly soul-crushing. Don't tell me you think the job of a walmart cashier in america values individuality and freedom in some uniquely american way.
Support staff in the US, and anywhere, for ages have had all their customer interactions recorded, and sentiment analysis run to automatically gauge them as being nice enough or not.
Amazon tracks warehouse worker's work-speed, and even has little tablets with games to try and make people work faster. You get fake virtual points and level up for fulfilling orders faster.
The company behind this also says it's trying to gamify a job requirement. These retail workers are required to smile and greet customers, and now it seems like they have an app that's giving them fake virtual points for doing a "good job".
The cashiers I see in the US don't look like they were trained to all behave and look exactly the same; and if they were, they certainly weren't making much of an attempt at it.
It's not like individualist cultures are immune to being horrible to service workers.
I was at lunch today watching a guy complain to some random employee at a Fuddrucker's that they'd put the mushrooms on top of the melted cheese rather than put the mushrooms on first and then melted the cheese on top of them. He was berating this poor girl for long enough that it was still ongoing when my food - which had been ordered only a minute before his had been up to the counter - was ready.
This wasn't in Japan or Korea. It was a middle-aged, apparently-decently-well-off white guy at a medium-upscale mall in suburban California.
I wonder how good it is at defecting fake smiles and attitudes. Because I'd rather interact with non-smiling staff than someone who is obviously faking it for the camera.
There's a funny anecdote about Walmart trying to open stores here in Germany, and when the business eventually failed, apparently one of the reasons was that German customers were routinely freaked out by the completely fake smiling staff and the weird company motivational chants in the morning.
When you see the sort of pearly white stereotypical American diner smile almost everyone would associate it with insincerity and fakeness or gullibility.
Also as a side note, that may be a pretty good benchmark for how clever AIs are. How many systems can figure out how the "hide the pain Harold" type of image is actually perceived by people?
Worked for Lidl in Germany in spite of much fussing over it at the time of introduction. Over a decade ago, I think? The tacky fake smile and greeting at the cashiers, they didn't have to do the chanting. Though that have seemed to calmed down somehow, from my memories of my more recent trips to the REICH.
> Because I'd rather interact with non-smiling staff than someone who is obviously faking it for the camera.
I've been on the receiving end of both numerous times and I'm not sure which I prefer if I'm honest.
- Door greeting. I prefer a fake smile. I'm not going to interact with you.
- I have a problem. I'm agnostic as long as you can help me.
Having just thought about it - there's different levels of fake and the shallower the interaction the less I care about your fake smile. But if we're at odds over an issue then I definitely don't want you to smile. That's comes across as a sociopath to me.
Interesting discoveries I just learned about myself.
Its a psychological thing. Cuta down on shoplifting, makes you more apt to buy something if you have to pass the same persone coming in and going out, etc. They would not hire them if it did not bolster the bottom line.
The first thing you see when you enter a store is a friendly and representative member of your community. You get a quick hit of that local, hometown vibe to suppress any feelings that you're stepping into a faceless, corporate machine that's swallowing up your local economy and sending it mostly to Walton's descendants.
Oh yeah, also got to check those receipts for objects too large to put in a bag.
> Door greeting. I prefer a fake smile. I'm not going to interact with you.
Is that actually still a thing? I remember hearing of it being a thing in the US, but I would kind of assumed it would have died out as the US economy approached full employment and wages rose. Never actually seen it when I've visited the US, but then I was only in large cities with very high labour costs.
I can see legitimate pushback in physical workplaces. But for low-value off-premises work, particularly at the low end, the battle is lost. The tech might rank staff in the interim. But the point is to use the constant feed of telemetry to train a replacement.
Oh god, I feel sorry for these employees. It’s so disgusting and inhumane to just think about somebody being forced to smile and judged by how good they do that, by a machine!
They already are expected to perform emotional work. Now they'll be measured, but measurement or not that expectation to smile depends on the business culture of your nation. In the US people are expected to smile.
Imagine customers think you're an unhappy waiter. Should they be able to withhold tips because on their romantic evening they're spending time thinking about your personal circumstances? If we say yes then we're basically talking about financial carrot and stick to making people smile.
Employers only care insofar as customers care. The customer is the root reason.
> Now they'll be measured, but measurement or not that expectation to smile depends on the business culture of your nation. In the US people are expected to smile.
You might have missed this. I'm expecting this technology is going to have impact beyond Japan so I specifically mentioned the US. If you want to keep on talking about Japan and not broader impact that's up to you.
> Employers are often disconnected from reality and don’t care about what customers feel. They think they have a great idea and implement it anyway.
Employers are allowed to run their own empiricism. This is no different than people being expected to dress as Donald Duck in Florida, except dressing as Donald Duck is likely much more awful work.
And if you think employers are disconnected then having less data is only going to worsen the situation. That's going to lend to more business superstition.
Being polite often IS emotional work, even for neurotypical people operating within normal environments. The nature of customer service is that you are dealing with the general public and expected to not tell them "sir, you're a raving lunatic" with any particular regularity (despite the fact that a pretty substantial portion of the population are in fact raving lunatics).
Even non-service jobs regularly involve emotional labor just to maintain good relationships with your colleagues, because some emotional labor is involved in almost any collective endeavor of human beings.
Quite a lot of AI bullshit is at least a little 1984-y; it's only a throwaway reference, but the pulp writing that's about the only thing that's legal to read in Airstrip One is written by machine!
One of the things you learn pretty quickly in business is that people (including you) are astoundingly parochial. They/you view the world, to some extent, only through the eyes of the world they live in.
And if you're a manager, the world you live in is one of trying to maximize the performance of your employees. You don't think of this as exploiting them or refusing to consider their needs. You think of it as making sure you're doing your job.
The people who are doing this probably don't think of it in terms of an employee who's having a hard day being docked 0.78 Positivity Points for an Insufficiently Enthusiastic Greeting. They think of it as detecting when an employee isn't doing their job, which is their job. Thinking otherwise requires actively modeling other people, often people who are unlike you, people who might differ from you in a status hierarchy or that you might view as not having been as successful as you. And keep in mind that if you're a manager, you do encounter people who aren't doing their job all the time. It's not a surprising thing to encounter.
For better or worse, smiling at cusotmers is a meaningful part of a service job. Look at almost any review list for a retail establishment or restaurant, and service is going to show up in a lot of them. Maybe if customer preferences changed, it wouldn't be, but it's not like companies get to decide what their customers do or don't want.
And with that mindset, you can see how you'd get to the point of boasting about it. "Look how well I'm doing my job," you say. "I'm going to make sure we're delivering exactly what customers want by finding a clever new use of technology. Sure, some people won't like it, but what are they saying? That I shouldn't ask my employees to do their job?"
*None of this is meant to defend the idea. What they're doing is horribly dystopian.*
But if we want to actually fight that dystopia, we need to understand where it comes from, and it's not people going "hooray I can abuse my workers even more!". A few people at the top who are particularly clear-minded about things might think that, but most people don't. Managers want to sleep at night, too. Instead, it's people saying "hooray, I did my job, a thing that is important to my well-being and identity, really well today!".
The term "banality of evil" applies here, but it's worse than banality. It's the way in which banal evil satisfies very real and wholesome human needs. Some guy woke up in 1943 Germany, went to his train-engineering job, worked really hard all day to be the best darn train engineer he could possibly be because he loved doing it more than anything else in the world, and went home and went to bed deeply satisfied next to his loving wife. It's that guy we gotta figure out.
PSA Japanese people would find this as weird as anyone else would, if not more so since Japanese people often make efforts to avoid being recorded and photographed.
That said I tried searching in Japanese for news coverage about this but the only things I found were the PR Times press release from Aeon, and an article based off of it from IT Media republished by a few no-name news blogs. So I guess the Japanese reception has been that of general disinterest.
They had something similar years ago in the UAE. In one of their happiness centers (translation: Complaint department for government) they had the doors refuse to open until the customer looked happy.
It only lasted a few days. The staff had to walk up to the door and smile to let people out.
Article 5 (f) of the EU AI Act, fresh from the press (published two weeks ago), prohibits "the (...) use of AI systems to infer emotions of a natural person in the areas of workplace and education institutions, except where the use of the AI system is intended to be put in place or into the market for medical or safety reasons". [1]
Penalties consist of fines up to EUR 35M or 7% of an undertaking's turnover, whichever is higher (article 99, §3 AI Act).
The prohibition will apply only from 2 February 2025 (see article 113 (a) AI Act).
Not a day too early, arguably even too late. Governments of the world, follow suit!
But I was told the EU was just overregulating AI and no innovation and etc...
I have to say I'm impressed by how quickly the EU managed to hash out AI regulations. I've only skimmed it but there are multiple good things there, on top of the above, like bans on critical decisions being taken only by AI, the need to have humans in the loop, the ability to be able to explain AI decisions for important things, etc.
It will definitely have kinks to iron out, but it's a good start and shows what good AI regulations could look like.
The EC will see these regulations as essentially a first draft; expect a new, likely stricter set in a few years, and probably on a regular cadence after that. We're currently on the Fifth AML Directive, for instance (the first was in 1990).
Whole thing is very creepy and weird, and no one involved will like or benefit from it. BUT. Can anyone explain what on earth "standardise its employees’ smiles" actually means? Are we talking quantity of teeth visible, mouth dilation, duration, accompanying sound etc?
51 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] thread"Hello there, It's great to hear from you and I hope you're doing well today! I will be happy to assist you!"
I didn't make this up, this is a real message I got from a support team.
Support staff in the US, and anywhere, for ages have had all their customer interactions recorded, and sentiment analysis run to automatically gauge them as being nice enough or not.
Amazon tracks warehouse worker's work-speed, and even has little tablets with games to try and make people work faster. You get fake virtual points and level up for fulfilling orders faster.
The company behind this also says it's trying to gamify a job requirement. These retail workers are required to smile and greet customers, and now it seems like they have an app that's giving them fake virtual points for doing a "good job".
I was at lunch today watching a guy complain to some random employee at a Fuddrucker's that they'd put the mushrooms on top of the melted cheese rather than put the mushrooms on first and then melted the cheese on top of them. He was berating this poor girl for long enough that it was still ongoing when my food - which had been ordered only a minute before his had been up to the counter - was ready.
This wasn't in Japan or Korea. It was a middle-aged, apparently-decently-well-off white guy at a medium-upscale mall in suburban California.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajsp.12322
Reminds me the "Welcome to costco, I love you" scene from Idiocracy: https://youtu.be/ZIFCWpn4qQ4?si=nJpGjA33-sf5QE_Z
When you see the sort of pearly white stereotypical American diner smile almost everyone would associate it with insincerity and fakeness or gullibility.
Also as a side note, that may be a pretty good benchmark for how clever AIs are. How many systems can figure out how the "hide the pain Harold" type of image is actually perceived by people?
I've been on the receiving end of both numerous times and I'm not sure which I prefer if I'm honest.
- Door greeting. I prefer a fake smile. I'm not going to interact with you.
- I have a problem. I'm agnostic as long as you can help me.
Having just thought about it - there's different levels of fake and the shallower the interaction the less I care about your fake smile. But if we're at odds over an issue then I definitely don't want you to smile. That's comes across as a sociopath to me.
Interesting discoveries I just learned about myself.
What's even the point of a door greeter if nobody interacts with them?
Oh yeah, also got to check those receipts for objects too large to put in a bag.
Is that actually still a thing? I remember hearing of it being a thing in the US, but I would kind of assumed it would have died out as the US economy approached full employment and wages rose. Never actually seen it when I've visited the US, but then I was only in large cities with very high labour costs.
Imagine customers think you're an unhappy waiter. Should they be able to withhold tips because on their romantic evening they're spending time thinking about your personal circumstances? If we say yes then we're basically talking about financial carrot and stick to making people smile.
Employers only care insofar as customers care. The customer is the root reason.
Any restaurant that allows tips already has human evaluation.
This must stop. Being polite is my only expectation.
> withhold tips
There are no tips in Japan.
> Employers only care insofar as customers care
Employers are often disconnected from reality and don’t care about what customers feel. They think they have a great idea and implement it anyway.
You might have missed this. I'm expecting this technology is going to have impact beyond Japan so I specifically mentioned the US. If you want to keep on talking about Japan and not broader impact that's up to you.
> Employers are often disconnected from reality and don’t care about what customers feel. They think they have a great idea and implement it anyway.
Employers are allowed to run their own empiricism. This is no different than people being expected to dress as Donald Duck in Florida, except dressing as Donald Duck is likely much more awful work.
And if you think employers are disconnected then having less data is only going to worsen the situation. That's going to lend to more business superstition.
Even non-service jobs regularly involve emotional labor just to maintain good relationships with your colleagues, because some emotional labor is involved in almost any collective endeavor of human beings.
So this is actually quite a nice surprise that this is literally something that would be in 1984!
The fact they are boasting about it publicly is sickening. This is quite frankly human abuse and they are proud of it.
And if you're a manager, the world you live in is one of trying to maximize the performance of your employees. You don't think of this as exploiting them or refusing to consider their needs. You think of it as making sure you're doing your job.
The people who are doing this probably don't think of it in terms of an employee who's having a hard day being docked 0.78 Positivity Points for an Insufficiently Enthusiastic Greeting. They think of it as detecting when an employee isn't doing their job, which is their job. Thinking otherwise requires actively modeling other people, often people who are unlike you, people who might differ from you in a status hierarchy or that you might view as not having been as successful as you. And keep in mind that if you're a manager, you do encounter people who aren't doing their job all the time. It's not a surprising thing to encounter.
For better or worse, smiling at cusotmers is a meaningful part of a service job. Look at almost any review list for a retail establishment or restaurant, and service is going to show up in a lot of them. Maybe if customer preferences changed, it wouldn't be, but it's not like companies get to decide what their customers do or don't want.
And with that mindset, you can see how you'd get to the point of boasting about it. "Look how well I'm doing my job," you say. "I'm going to make sure we're delivering exactly what customers want by finding a clever new use of technology. Sure, some people won't like it, but what are they saying? That I shouldn't ask my employees to do their job?"
*None of this is meant to defend the idea. What they're doing is horribly dystopian.*
But if we want to actually fight that dystopia, we need to understand where it comes from, and it's not people going "hooray I can abuse my workers even more!". A few people at the top who are particularly clear-minded about things might think that, but most people don't. Managers want to sleep at night, too. Instead, it's people saying "hooray, I did my job, a thing that is important to my well-being and identity, really well today!".
The term "banality of evil" applies here, but it's worse than banality. It's the way in which banal evil satisfies very real and wholesome human needs. Some guy woke up in 1943 Germany, went to his train-engineering job, worked really hard all day to be the best darn train engineer he could possibly be because he loved doing it more than anything else in the world, and went home and went to bed deeply satisfied next to his loving wife. It's that guy we gotta figure out.
That said I tried searching in Japanese for news coverage about this but the only things I found were the PR Times press release from Aeon, and an article based off of it from IT Media republished by a few no-name news blogs. So I guess the Japanese reception has been that of general disinterest.
https://x.com/YoDanno/status/1629235911635369984
It only lasted a few days. The staff had to walk up to the door and smile to let people out.
Penalties consist of fines up to EUR 35M or 7% of an undertaking's turnover, whichever is higher (article 99, §3 AI Act).
The prohibition will apply only from 2 February 2025 (see article 113 (a) AI Act).
Not a day too early, arguably even too late. Governments of the world, follow suit!
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...
I have to say I'm impressed by how quickly the EU managed to hash out AI regulations. I've only skimmed it but there are multiple good things there, on top of the above, like bans on critical decisions being taken only by AI, the need to have humans in the loop, the ability to be able to explain AI decisions for important things, etc.
It will definitely have kinks to iron out, but it's a good start and shows what good AI regulations could look like.