The Third Axis
How AI Treats People
Capability tells you whether a system can do the task. Safety tells you whether it will refuse the dangerous ones. Neither tells you what happens to the person on the other end of an ordinary bad moment. That third property is behavioral quality, and this column is the working record of building a measurement standard around it.
The archive
Every piece, most recent first. This archive is the canonical record; each piece also appears on Substack.
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The Attentive Waiter
In 2011, Ryan Buell and Michael Norton of Harvard Business School built a fake travel…
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Filed Under Name
On September 13, Delta’s chatbot handed my conversation to a human agent with a short summary attached. The reason it gave for the chat was a vague…
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“Please Use the Form”
Late in August I asked Frontier Airlines’ chatbot what size bag I could bring for free. Frontier’s website has the…
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The Right Moment for a Human
Earlier this summer I told a retail chatbot I was shopping for a mattress and did not want to spend too much. It thanked me for sharing my budget…
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The AI Nobody Is Asked About
The Americans who use artificial intelligence the most are the ones turning against it the fastest. Among adults under 30, those who say they are more…
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The Persona Is a Promise
Think about the last time you opened a customer service chat. You were probably not browsing. Something had already gone wrong: a charge you did not…
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The Decision Nobody Had to Tell Me About
On a Thursday afternoon in August I typed my own domain into my own browser and got an error. Not a slow page or a broken layout. The connection failed…
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The Bots that Exit the Measurement
Somewhere in a chat window right now, a person is a few minutes into explaining a problem to a company that already has their money. They type an ordinary…
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The Assortment You Cannot See
You need to buy something, or fix something, and a chat window is the way in. You describe the problem in your own words. The system comes back with one…
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The Missing Axis
Everyone has had the moment. You open a chat window with a question you could have asked a person in fifteen seconds. A minute later you are not working…
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The Two Checks a Bot Passed Without Answering Anything
I asked the USPS virtual assistant how long First-Class Mail takes to be delivered. It told me it could not find anything and asked me to rephrase. So I…
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What Happens When You Ask a Chatbot to Start Over
A few weeks ago I opened Hertz's customer service chat and asked it a simple question: what does it cost to cancel a prepaid rental? It answered…
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