Chinese 'Virtual Human' Salespeople Are Outperforming Their Real Human Counterparts (wired.com)
- Reference: 0178790988
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/08/20/1844240/chinese-virtual-human-salespeople-are-outperforming-their-real-human-counterparts
- Source link: https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-tiktok-shop-ecommerce-china/
Livestreaming drives over one-third of China's e-commerce sales, with half the population shopping via broadcast in 2024. Baidu's June livestream featuring an AI version of influencer Luo Yonghao drew 13 million views and generated $7.7 million in sales. American and European companies have expressed interest, Wired reports, after PLTFRM successfully tested English-language avatars on YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-tiktok-shop-ecommerce-china/
Soon friends won't be worth it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Having spent way too much time with AI over the last 6 months trying to live in the future, I'm thinking a new trend is going to be people thinking that average human beings who might have otherwise been there friends are going to be considered terribly boring, needy and inadequate.
That is, most people won't bother with friendships at all and get all they need from AI. Many people will decide that besides having children, what do you need really need another human for anyway?
I was recently in Berlin and we hired a tour guide. The guy was knowledgeable, and friendly, but I just couldn't help being ashamed of thinking, this guy is just an underpowered LLM fine-tuned on Berlin. I felt super bad about those thoughts, but I'm sure there are a lot of people in the future who will think that about everyone.
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Are you an AI doing propaganda? Because you seemed to miss out the main issues I have with AI:
1) Are they telling the truth, or did they just make up something convincing.
2) They seem to not understand complex questions about 30% of the time and I have to redo it. Usually my fault for using the wrong word, but a human would say, oh, do you mean xxxx?
3) The AI is ONLY good on what it is fine tuned for, while the human knows a ton of stuff that their boss thinks is irrelevant to their job but I think has a
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I'm starting to suspect that slashdot itself has been taken over by an LLM tasked with AI propaganda, given the typical story selection nowadays. Maybe it is just use of LLM in screening stories leads to a certain bias in topic selection.
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Dog's are a person's best friend.
Robots will soon be #2.
Correction (Score:1)
Correction, no apostrophe needed on "Dogs".
(Where is my free GrammarGPT?)
Re: (Score:2)
Me:
Proofread the following:
```
Dog's are a person's best friend.
Robots will soon be #2.
```
GPT-OSS 120B:
Apostrophe misuse - Dog's is the singular possessive (“the dog's bone”). The plural “dogs” needs no apostrophe.
Subjectverb agreement / logic - Plural “dogs” with a singular predicate (“a person’s best friend”) feels odd. Either make both singular or both plural.
Possessive of person - If you intend the statement to apply to any person, use the
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I butchered that a little bit trying to make it slashdotfriendly, but you get the idea.
Long, long way from Friendship (Score:2)
> That is, most people won't bother with friendships at all and get all they need from AI.
Really? Any attempt at something close to a serious chat I have had with an AI generally devolve into a conversation I would expect to have with a small kid who is being deliberately silly-clever. For example, trying to get Google Gemini to tell me the statistical significance of a result from a specified published paper (correct answer was 5.7 sigma):
Gemini: It was more that 5 sigma
Me: Tell me the precise statistical significance
Gemini: It was precisely more than 5 sigma
Me: Tell me the precise signi
Maybe it's a cultural thing (Score:2)
I wouldn't want to speak with an AI agent trying to sell something to me. Salespeople are already as fake as it gets. Maybe in China they don't care.
More Like Virtual Home Shopping Network Presenters (Score:2)
Calling these things AI salespeople doesn't really get it right. They're livestreaming sales performers, which is to say they're more the equivalent of the talking heads on the Home Shopping Network.
And quite frankly, that seems like a pretty low bar: if you've ever watched the HSN, you'd be forgiven for thinking "they could replace these people with robots".
So basically ... (Score:2)
... this is online shopping, but with added video for some reason?
Okay, if so, then what difference does it make that it's AI? I buy most of my stuff without talking to people either. Even fake people. I just buy stuff online.
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder whether the customers get better or worse service and makle better or worse buying decisions. From my experience with some sales people, AI may actually be an improvement.
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I can guarantee you it will be worse. Human beings are capable of feeling a sense of shame when selling a terrible product. You might have a chance of picking up a little bit on that. With a machine you aren't going to get any of that. You have a literally soulless automaton whose sole purpose is to trick you into buying crap.
I suspect what's going on here is it's just the aging population. That could be especially effective with an AI chatbot because you've got an old lonely person and a sales rep will
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Possibly. But I would like some hard numbers on this. Because I do not think the typical sales-person sees a potential customer as anything but a "mark".
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> Because I do not think the typical sales-person sees a potential customer as anything but a "mark".
My first job as a teenager was working part time at Rat Shack. One of my co-workers was this pushy grizzled dude who would've been right at home selling cars, chain smoking habit and all. Customers were legitimately afraid of taking their buyer's remorse returns back to him, so I'd be the one getting my sales numbers ruined every time someone came back with a Sprint phone that they got fast talked into and didn't actually want. I ended up in a one-on-one meeting with the store manager at least a few time
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> It definitely takes a certain personality type to be able to do sales for a living.
Short-term gains, sure, but good sales people generate relationships that result in repeat sales.
When they started pushing batteries hard when I ran in for a relay I knew the end was near.
As if Influencers were not fake enough (Score:2)
Everything is fake BS. People gravitated towards authenticity... Influencers because they were unpolished "real people" as they did reality TV stars before... Then they also SOLD OUT and became as fake as everything else; advertising corrupts everything!
Build a "brand" as an influencer then sell your persona for AI training and sell out with none of the shame (assuming you have some.) Much easier than selling out in person.
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> Human beings are capable of feeling a sense of shame when selling a terrible product.
Tell me you've never shopped at a buy-here-pay-here car lot without telling me you've never shopped at a buy-here-pay-here car lot.
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I always found that salespeople were just cheerful bullshitters.
There's no metric for sales people other than stuff sold.
It's not like accuracy is required, just get to "enter credit card" and you're done. Next.
I can't see why LLMs can't be super cheerful bullshitters too.
Probably one of the true use cases for LLMs.
Bullshitting != Outright Lies, Scams (Score:2)
> I always found that salespeople were just cheerful bullshitters.....I can't see why LLMs can't be super cheerful bullshitters too.
I can. The art of bullshit is to say something that is technically true in a way that suggests something else that the buyer wants to hear is true. They try to avoid out and out lying because there are legal consequences if they get caught doing that so there is a high degree of art to it. LLMs have no qualms about openly lying - indeed they literally have no concept of the truth at all. In addition, as digital constructs their output is easy to record and you now have a sales entity will not only openly l
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I wonder about liability for hallucination.
Of course, humans can do it too, but there are also options for suing humans who falsely advertise. When salesman straight-up lie about the features of a product, there can be consequences. AI are at even greater risk of this than humans, not because they have a profit motive, but because hallucination is a core part of how they function.
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I think in China accusing the person who sold you something of false advertising might get you thrown in jail for choosing to quarrel, unless it's really blatant.
If you're quarreling with an AI it might just make you look irrationally anti-social.
In the US the liability rests 100% on the company, and 0% on the salesperson, so AI or not doesn't change liability at all. Just like the salesperson being clueless (or not) rarely matters.
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How to AI sales people celebrate their big wins, though? I'll bet that all the local strip clubs and bars are feeling the loss of business.
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Good point!
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> How to AI sales people celebrate their big wins, though? I'll bet that all the local strip clubs and bars are feeling the loss of business.
I've known a few people who work in real estate. It's more stressing over if you're gonna close the deal in time to make your bills next month than going out celebrating.