To me the second response reads more like PR-speak, like somebody who's been over-coached on how to talk to customers.

I find it strange that they'd have an AI-driven followup email days after the survey. If you're automating it, why the delay? "Delay the response so it seems more human" is way too cynical.

It's worth noting that OP is talking about Ocado, too. I've been a client of theirs for over ten years, and the number one reason why I keep buying from them is that their delivery drivers never feel super-hurried. They have lower quotas than drivers for other services, and they always have time for a little bit of banter. Compare that e.g. to Amazon Fresh drivers, who'll always just leave the groceries at the door and knock. They're already gone by the time I open the door.

I find it unlikely that they'd automate this sort of second-level customer support response while not squeezing the everliving shit out of their drivers.

One particular sentence reads particularly human to me:

> It is rare to get feedback that tells us exactly what is broken and how to fix it. AI doesn't remember from one conversation to another, so probably can't say how rare something like this is at Ocado (although admittedly it could learn that it's generally rare in fine tuning). I also expect AI to be trained not to compare feedback with other people's feedback.

It does smell like AI. The one bit that gave me pause was "Thank you again, I do hope that this issue is resolved quickly." AIs don't usually do comma splices. Maybe it was AI with light human editing.

The thing about this whole post is that AI-written text doesn't tell you a single thing about whether a human was involved.

A thing about tier 1 CS agents is that they are often not highly literate and great at writing, and companies go to great lengths to minimize how much text they need to freehand, with tons of pre-writes to address common situations. LLMs allow the agent to express some freeform idea and have the LLM clean it up to read clearly and professionally. So even if you are 100% dealing with a human, you should expect nearly all text from them to be LLM-written.

And also to pangram 4.1, which rates it as 100% AI Generated.

I read it twice and the second time it stood out as not.

Usually there is a taste about AI generated messages that are just quite obvious, it's usually pretty close to corporate speak, but not exactly the same.

> There is nothing more frustrating than pointing out a legitimate bug only to feel like you're talking to a brick wall.

At a bare minimum, this sentence was AI inspired. Likely generated. Which certainly casts the whole response into doubt (that it is human-written.) Reads more to me like a person gave a quick quippy response to an AI to clean up, then just took the output and replied.

That is what I immediatelly detected too, but was in shock that the author fell for it.

To put salt in the wound, I wonder if the first AI ever even raised the issue with a support team. Pretty much every customer support AI has gaslit me saying it escalated, or please wait for a human to contact you, and then sitting there for an hour or more to confirm that, yes, that was just hallucinated in the prompt, and it's been waiting for my next prompt ever since.

The good thing about AI support is that absolutely flipping out in the chat actually does get escalated, unlike with a human who just digs in their heels.

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This thread highlights why I often say that at some point in the future, the obsession with whether something was written by AI or not will be classified as a mental disorder.