Y2K Voice Jail ➡️ AI Jail in Y2.25K
AI is being pushed into everything... to our detriment? It can be extremely useful, but not always. [A Rant]
Today I called my (formerly) favorite hardware store1, Lowe’s in Tarpon Springs, Florida, and was immediately attended to by their AI voicejailmail system. This AI “assistant” responded to my initial query for a human by telling me how it could help me with my order status and other things of questionable value.
After a few choice words on my end, it eventually sent me to the store where I was put on hold until I hung up. A (pyrrhic) victory for them, as this interaction was successfully dealt with sans human labor.
But then I called back. I submitted to the AI and asked it if they had a certain type of particle board. As with the website, it said it did not, but noted that they could order it for me. After again begging for a human, getting put on hold, talking to one person, then getting transferred to another person, I was told that no, they did not have it and could not order it. Thanks Mylow.
In a recent post about predicted words of the 2000s (as seen from our 2026 vantage point), I lamented that the term “voice-jail system” hadn’t become prominent in this future-present. As I consider it now, this might not have been a simple case of the wording itself being forgotten, but that things ACTUALLY GOT BETTER… temporarily. As the Internet fully proliferated our lives, returning a product, checking your bank account, or any number of useful tasks often transformed from a voice jail ordeal to a couple of clicks.
Sure, voice jail never really went away, but my gut feeling is that we as a society were spending less and less time in this audible purgatory. Rather than taking this opportunity to make the lower number of calls more efficient, corporations have doubled down on the concept—with the help of AI—to get their voice systems to “accomplish” more, a condition I’ll refer to as AI Jail.
AI Jail has, of course helped make voice jail systems less efficient on average2, while executives likely spin it as somehow saving costs. But consider where else AI has… affected our lives (for the worse):
This AI Jail system in China automatically names and shames you if you jaywalk. Look for similar frivolous AI Jail automated enforcement coming to your country soon. Perhaps there will even be a version for ambitious home owners associations, automatically judging your grass and issuing fines!
I neither read nor speak Chinese. I’d assume it says something like “This is a bad lady who jaywalks with reckless abandon. Shame!” Image One could make a pretty good argument that this sort of overreach3 has already made it to the USA. Maybe it’s not as bad, but I wonder how USA AI Jail tolerance will shift in the next decade or two. At least Ring can find your lost dog… Or it could — in theory(?) — be used by hackers, government employees, or anyone with the proper access to do all kinds of Orwellian stuff.
Fast food drive-through ordering is now AI-assisted(?) in many locations! You didn’t want 300 McBurglars? Good luck getting a human to change things around. Fortunately, it misidentified you as that other guy who also happens to have two eyes and brownish hair. He will have to venture into the realm of AI Jail to fight the charges on your behalf.4
I recently went to Wendy’s and Mc-Voice-Jail inquired about what I wanted. I said two Biggie bags, which it got correct. However, when I tried to specify different drinks for each one, that blew its AI warden mind and I had to speak to a Mc-teenager (who, to his credit, did a good job).If you receive a long email that is grammatically correct, but maybe a little too wordy, do you read the whole thing out of respect for the time that the sender supposedly put into it? Or do you summarize it via your own AI, maybe missing a few details, but saving you precious seconds?
Or maybe you run it through an AI checker routine to be sure it was written by a human, then read it… But then that takes time, so what’s the point of any of this? Here you’ve put yourself into AI Jail just based on the threat! [Further elaboration]While automation used to imply [getting out of] tedious manual tasks, AI can now take care of fun creative stuff that… you now don’t have time for, for some reason! In AI Jail — unlike regular jail, where you stereotypically, read, work out, and play/make up up harmonica-based blues songs — you no longer have to worry about such pursuits, or even finding songs that suit your mood by human artists. Just type in what you want to hear and the music will appear, as if by magic!
AI can even help you work out, according to the commercials. So like real jail/prison, but with extra features!
ChatGPT can help you work out. Apparently. Image [screenshot] Verification, verification, verification! I’m not sure this can be blamed directly on AI Jail, but you may have noticed that verification often requires much more work than putting in a strong password. My particular credit union has me verify after logging in, sometimes more than one time during a session.
I suspect they’re trying to catch up to the AI Jail technology employed at larger monetary repositories. At least they haven’t auto-opened any accounts for me (AFAIK).While we’re on this subject, who really wants more CoPilot on their computers? Do you really need CoPilot to tell you “do whatever you want, it’s temporary anyway” when attempting to skirt HOA rules during Christmas? I used Windows machines (and Linux for a while) up until ~4 years ago. For this and other reasons, I’m glad I made the switch to Apple. I hope that they don’t go all-in on the same mistake — it might be time to try Linux again.
What do all of these things have in common? AI, a technology that is supposed to save you time, make your life easier, and make business operations more efficient seems to be doing the opposite. Or, at the very least, it’s neutral-ish but annoying while taking a lot of power for processing.
In fact, who’s to say that THIS VERY EMAIL that you’re reading isn’t a product of AI Jail slop expulsion? It isn’t, but wouldn’t I say the same thing if I was an AI? How would you know? How would I even know? Maybe I need to lay off the caffeine.
But no, I don’t use AI to write this newsletter, save for some research duties and questions like “should I use lose or loose” if I were to talk about how I was going to lose my loose use of AI in a sentence. Thanks for reading! -JC5
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Even better, use “AI Jail” in a sentence 👆 and when whoever is listening says “what’s that?” tell them that you heard about it on www.techadjacent.io!
Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly-ish about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness. -JC
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Addendum/Footnotes:
OK, the local Lowe’s is still my favorite. It’s pretty close to my house, clean, and for whatever reason never seems that busy. Sure, not being busy is bad for the business, but good for me as a customer. Also, their saw for cutting plywood wasn’t broken for like two years circa 2020 like another nearby hardware store.
Also, they seemed weirdly tolerant of my kids pushing lawn mowing equipment around when I briefly disappeared down an aisle to grab tiki fuel IIRC. Really nice and helpful people there… once you get past Mylow.
Admittedly, voice jail systems becoming less efficient as of late is a bit of an assumption/anecdotal. LMK your thoughts in the comments!
Thx for the tip Jason!
I actually think AI drive-through voice recognition might be a good application it. I suspect it could get the order right nearly as much as a human fast food worker once it has a bit of time to mature. Whether it can handle questions or special requests remains to be seen. OTOH, how are they supposed to keep their prices so low if they have keep paying meat-people to do things that AI wardens can perform:
And yes, facial recognition is far better than stated.
“Thanks you for coming to my TED talk,” one might say. The first time I heard this was after interviewing someone who might not be considered famous, but at least well-known. I said, in all seriousness — and somewhat apologetically, as it seemed like this should have come up in preparation for the interview — that I hadn’t watched her TED talk. She informed me, graciously IIRC, that this is an expression for, “Thanks for listening to my rant.” Now I (and perhaps you) know what that means.
Probably my favorite essay of yours, and McTeenager made me laugh out loud.