You phrase it well. It's not the AI themselves. You can as easily get an AI to take something fundamentally banal and write it into something exciting, dynamic, exotic, or strange.

If you analyze these systems as a work of art, using the postmodern toolset, the people and systems taking one of the most potent technologies humanity has ever created and using it to craft a banality machine is just... very revealing. Like the great-uncle who can't even finish protesting how non-racist he is without using a racial slur in the process.

"We're innovative! We're hip! We're on the cutting edge! We're setting trends! Now here, let me help you turn your text into the grayest corporate sludge imaginable."

It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.

> postmodern

It is, isn't it. It's the Sokal Hoax on a society-wide automated scale: rather than being concerned with what a "text" might "mean", generate millions upon millions of "text" sequences and mechanically separate those which pass as real enough. Baudrillard's simulacrum.

> It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.

People seem to be very insistent that the output of AI is not capital-A art, because that threatens their worldview, ignoring how artists had previously pushed to expand "art" away from any concerns of technique, intent, legibility etc.

I mean the system itself is art. The output is some kind of anti-art, but the system that uses the world's most amazing technology to extract the art out of everything that passes through it is an amazing piece of inadvertent outsider art on its own.

"The obsessive need for AI developers (...)" - Of product product/business people trying to fit into the "AI era". Developers, if given a chance, wouldn't probably built this.

Honestly the only spot-on use case I can think of for an eternally calm, friendly, totally bland and generic customer service AI is for interacting with the Karens of the world and only because it would spare the nerves of human employees and because the logs would no doubt be hilarious to read.

I feel like nothing would turn me into a Karen more than interacting with AI customer service on a regular basis.

It’s already severely frustrating that at many companies, you have to talk to several people (separated by copious waiting) to get your problem solved after handling a severely outdated and underdeveloped phone system.

An empowered customer service team could do this by refusing service.

Its an offense to justice that its so easy to get away with being mean to service workers.

The alternative is being mean to more expensively paid workers. That's what the suppart staff is ultimately paid for.

Never going to argue against better pay, but-

I see it as like- if you were the owner of a company, you could decide for yourself what the $/abuse trade off is, and for each individual customer decide if it's worth it.

As a disempowered employee, you can only decide in aggregate if the total $ vs total abuse is worth it. So in order to keep getting paid at all, you Must put up with every interaction. Which leads to no alternative to the person being abused and no real consequences for the person being abusive, which is a shame. And it seems a lot easier to take abuse if you know you have the upper hand and have an out if you ever want it.

I definitely don't disagree.