Call Center Workers Are Tired of Being Mistaken for AI

Bloomberg reports:

By the time Jessica Lindsey's customers accuse her of being an AI, they are often already shouting. For the past two years, her work as a call center agent for outsourcing company Concentrix has been punctuated by people at the other end of the phone demanding to speak to a real human. Sometimes they ask her straight, 'Are you an AI?' Other times they just start yelling commands: 'Speak to a representative! Speak to a representative...!' Skeptical customers are already frustrated from dealing with the automated system that triages calls before they reach a person. So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine. 'They just end up yelling at me and hanging up,' she said, leaving Lindsey sitting in her home office in Oklahoma, shocked and sometimes in tears. 'Like, I can't believe I just got cut down at 9:30 in the morning because they had to deal with the AI before they got to me....'
In Australia, Canada, Greece and the US, call center agents say they've been repeatedly mistaken for AI. These people, who spend hours talking to strangers, are experiencing surreal conversations, where customers ask them to prove they are not machines... [Seth, a US-based Concentrix worker] said he is asked if he's AI roughly once a week. In April, one customer quizzed him for around 20 minutes about whether he was a machine. The caller asked about his hobbies, about how he liked to go fishing when not at work, and what kind of fishing rod he used. '[It was as if she wanted] to see if I glitched,' he said. 'At one point, I felt like she was an AI trying to learn how to be human....'

Sarah, who works in benefits fraud-prevention for the US government — and asked to use a pseudonym for fear of being reprimanded for talking to the media — said she is mistaken for AI between three or four times every month... Sarah tries to change her inflections and tone of voice to sound more human. But she's also discovered another point of differentiation with the machines. 'Whenever I run into the AI, it just lets you talk, it doesn't cut you off,' said Sarah, who is based in Texas. So when customers start to shout, she now tries to interrupt them. 'I say: 'Ma'am (or Sir). I am a real person. I'm sitting in an office in the southern US. I was born.''

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