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 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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