Ok, so I won’t bore you with the back and forth details that led up to this. The important thing to know is that I needed to talk to a human at the IRS to ask a very simple question that would take just a few minutes to look into.
Me trying to call for 3 days dozens of calls dealing with this shit. I eventually figured out how to prompt the AI to let me push buttons to reach menus.
After all that I plotted out what each option does.
ALL OF THEM either lead to a pre-recorded message that says to visit the website, OR attempts to transfer you, before telling you there are no agents taking calls for that option.
Eventually, I wondered what would happen if I said to the AI agent “TAX FRAUD”.
Boom. Straight through to an agent.
I feel bad for lying to the hotline, but also, I was left no valid options to talk to a human. Once I said tax fraud, my issue which I had spent probably 100 calls in 3 days trying to get through, was over in 10 minutes. And 6 of those minutes she put me back on hold to research my issue.
Fuck AI
We all know Trump gutted the IRS. This is what happens when nobody works there anymore. This is not just an AI problem. The administration is just using the AI to hide the truth. Of course the few survivors are assigned to Tax Fraud, so they can help Trump and his cronies commit it.
Sounds like a good time to avoid being audited. As in, very easy to do.
Nah I work in the business and they’re still auditing people. It just takes a hell of a lot longer to get it all sorted out bc it takes ages to actually talk to a real person or set up an appt if needed
Sometimes too if you swear at the chatbot enough it’ll escalate you to a human.
May not work for IRS or government agencies but it does tend to work for companies.
I’m certain some of those calls by me were profanity laced. I have no kids, and live alone. So me talking to a spatula isn’t out of the question, and cursing at whatever I’m angry at is pretty common at my place.
So I’m sure just instinctively I cursed this AI out a few times.
Plus…it’s AI. If AI isn’t to be cursed at, what is?
Last time I swore at a chatbot it hung up on me
I usually mumble. That usually gets me to a human.
Thanks. They e been holding my refund since February. No notices. Nothing on the website… just sitting there with a “it’s taking longer than expected”
I think that counts as tax fraud
i think i’m missing some context… so the IRS now runs a LLM bot on their hotline?
Wasn’t using LLMs in call trees and chat bots one of the fist implementations? And the reason why a real person is so hard to get a hold of is likely due to DOGE cuts. Paying someone to help people seems like an unnecessary expense if you don’t want to help people.
No, this isn’t about AI.
You can integrate IVR (traditional phone tree) with LLMs.
That doesn’t even make sense, phone trees are deterministic.
You use the LLM to navigate the phone tree and allow the user to skip levels and menus
A contrived example:
At a top level, Thing might branch into subThing1, subThing2, subThing3.
A user might say subThing3 or a similarly worded item and bypass extraneous layers of IVR.
It lets you skip levels and not have to be as precise beyond what an IVR implementation might miss.
“Customer service”, “agent”, “representative”, etc, etc. are all equivalent, but one might be missed.
LLMs do help with this circumstance
That’s still deterministic, what you are describing has been around far, far longer than llm technology.
it seems to be? wdym?
OP is describing a phone tree, it’s a flow chart at best and have existed long before LLMs.
reminds my of that drive-through ai you could bypass by ordering like 50’000 cups of water
