Dumb Chatbots – Another In A Sporadic Series Examining AI
Seven years ago we wrote about an interaction with the JustAnswer web site and its conversing ability when one side (me) is being illogical. Surprisingly, not much has changed. The AI algorithm is as dumb as ever.
I want some information about a piece of silver or is it silverplate. So I turn to the google and plug in a search with the keywords. The first site I am directed to is JustAnswer.com, with antique specialists available.
This is not what I wanted. I just need to know what the two letter hallmark after the International Silver name stood for. A live person would answer my questions I was told.
But of course that is not what happens when you click on “ask a question.”
The site is geared to extract money from your wallet by answering your extremely simple or complex question from the expert about the item.
But, before the (supposed) human will help you, you interact first with a “chatbot” which apparently is incapable of shutting down a conversation that from the get-go is ridiculous.
I was not going to use the service. So what happens if you enter something irrelevant?
Here is the brief conversation.
So I did not enter my credit card card information in the pop-up window. And while living here in the mental institution on Neptune, I will figure out what the “CC” hallmark stands for on the silver tray without JustAnswer’s help.
It’s fine to ridicule second tier shitty AI that gets forcibly pushed free of charge at customers who don’t know better, but do take ten minutes to familiarize yourself with the state of the art in this field — GPT-5.5 disproving the unit distance conjecture, Fable getting directly banned by the US govt for being too good at finding security vulnerabilities, current capabilities of Claude Code / Codex, etc etc. There is no “The” “AI algorithm”, and saying that “it” is “as dumb as ever” is detached from the technical reality.
The state of the art in the field…in a lab is one thing. In an open discussion forum over an extended time period is another. If you really want to see how your “state of the art” Chatbots perform IRL, head over to the “Open” category of craigslist’s discussion forums. The site’s CEO, Jim Buckmaster, and his good friend Sam Altman, have been using the site’s otherwise largely abandoned forums as a real world testing ground for their latest chatbot iterations.
I’d start at https://www.silvercollection.it/Englishsilvermarks3C.html