\u201cThe ick cringe factor whilst wasting completely unnecessary time was enough to make me hate Olive and wish her harm,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n
And one user on X said their mum had contacted Olive and received the same kind of response.<\/p>\n
Olive \u201ckept claiming to be a real person and started talking about its memories of its mother and her angry voice\u201d, they said.<\/p>\n
A Woolworths spokesperson told AFP the responses about birthdays had been written by a human employee.<\/p>\n
\u201cOlive has been around since 2018. Over this time, customer feedback for Olive has been very positive, with many noting its personality,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n
\u201cA number of responses about birthdays were written for Olive by a team member several years ago as a more personal way for Olive to connect with customers.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a result of customer feedback, we recently removed this particular scripting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Woolworths is one of Australia\u2019s largest supermarket chains and is far from the only company to have employed AI-powered customer service assistants.<\/p>\n
The company said in January it had teamed up with Google to make Olive capable of doing more tasks for customers, including meal planning.<\/p>\n
AI agents are increasingly widespread but experts warn they can \u201challucinate\u201d non-existent events.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe ick cringe factor whilst wasting completely unnecessary time was enough to make me hate Olive and wish…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[1443,74,365,10007,363,364,2731,1135,5195,1558,10712,6852,679,13313,16420,78,6178,111,139,69,166673,166672,163989,15267,2552,97,145,61,16742,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-304442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-about","9":"tag-after","10":"tag-ai","11":"tag-aipowered","12":"tag-artificial-intelligence","13":"tag-artificialintelligence","14":"tag-assistant","15":"tag-australian","16":"tag-be","17":"tag-been","18":"tag-claiming","19":"tag-customer","20":"tag-forced","21":"tag-giant","22":"tag-human","23":"tag-in","24":"tag-mother","25":"tag-new-zealand","26":"tag-newzealand","27":"tag-nz","28":"tag-rambling","29":"tag-rein","30":"tag-reins","31":"tag-reported","32":"tag-service","33":"tag-supermarket","34":"tag-technology","35":"tag-to","36":"tag-users","37":"tag-woolworths"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}