Just a little AI resistance, as a treat

# Just a little AI resistance, as a treat Source: [https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/11/just-a-little-ai-resistance-as-a-treat/](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/11/just-a-little-ai-resistance-as-a-treat/) At the recent EMFCamp, I bumped in to[Professor Kate Devlin](https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/kate-devlin)who was talking a little about the[AI Resist List](https://airesistlist.org/)\. I think one of the useful things we can do is loudly complain about shitty uses of AI\. Here's an example\. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm[contacting companies which send malformed calendar invites](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/google-calendar-unable-to-launch-event-caused-by-missing-dtstamp/)\. One of the organisation I contacted was the British online supermarket Ocado\. They don't have an easy way to contact their technical team, and no obvious paths to raise a bug report, so I filled in their usual customer service feedback form\. I included a clear statement of the problem and a detailed technical analysis of why I thought it was a problem with their service\. After sending in my message, I received this back from "Lulu" at Ocado: > Thanks for getting in touch and sharing this feedback about our calendar files\. You're entirely right—having a technical glitch pop up when you're trying to organise your delivery is a real pain, so I've made sure to pass your feedback on to our technical and webshop team\. We really appreciate you taking the time to help us improve our service\. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day I mean, that's AI right? It starts with the classic tell of a[sycophantic agreement](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3382)\. Next up is the em\-dash\.[Beloved by chatbots](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/books/review/em-dash-chatbot-human-language.html)but almost unheard of in British English style guides\. Finally \(and this is hard to quantify\) it just doesn't*feel*like a customer service response\. They're usually poorly spelled, have dodgy grammar, and ask a bunch of irrelevant questions\. The message gave me no confidence that anyone had looked at the problem and I doubted it had been passed on to a technically competent human\. I immediately got a customer satisfaction survey\. Usually I give top marks to humans because, even though[Net Promoter Score is bullshit](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/whats-the-incentive-to-tell-the-truth-on-surveys/), I don't want customer service agents to suffer the indignity of a bad review\. But in this survey I vented my spleen \- giving crappy 1 ⭐ scores on every metric and complaining vociferously about how*rude*it is to use an AI to deal with a genuine complaint\. I was both surprised and delighted to receive this back a few days after my invective was sent: > I saw your survey comment about getting a robotic, AI\-generated response previously, and I wanted to reach out personally to apologise\. There is nothing more frustrating than pointing out a legitimate bug only to feel like you're talking to a brick wall\. I promise you there is a real person typing this out\! Second, I wanted to send a massive thank you for the incredibly detailed diagnostic\. It is rare to get feedback that tells us*exactly*what is broken and how to fix it\. I can assure you that this has been passed to our team to look into\. Your feedback is going to make things much smoother for a lot of people, and we really appreciate you taking the extra time to help us get it right\. Thank you again, I do hope that this issue is resolved quickly\. If there is anything else I can help with in the meantime, please don't hesitate to get in touch\. Perhaps I'm being touchingly naïve, but that*feels*a lot more human, right? The grammar isn't perfect, the sentences are a bit more rambly, and it appears to have actually engaged with the contents of my message\. I get that having a million irate customer service messages is a hassle\. Using AI to triage them probably makes business sense, summarising the verbose ones could be useful for customer service agents, and totting up general themes is almost certainly a sensible way to gather metrics without overloading the workforce\. But using an AI to reply to a human is just disrespectful\. It says the organisation values their customer's time at less than their own\. It's OK to call out shitty AI responses and insist that a human engages with you\.