The ice maker in our somewhat new Korean manufactured refrigerator is broken. A quick Google reveals that it is a common problem and a class action lawsuit may be in the works. My wife decided to contact The Manufacturer and see if they would fix it without charge. Texting on-line she was able to get a confirmation from the Manufacturer that yes, we could get it fixed, for free.

When my wife went to schedule a repair, she couldn’t get the charges waived. Around this time she gets an email to rate the response. One of the first questions was: were you aware that this was a chatBot handling your service? Uh, no. But that makes sense.

So AI promised us a free repair, but there seems to be no record of this, except the log of the chat. Will the Manufacturer honor the promises of its AI? We will see.

I was fortunate to meet Eugenio at the very end of my career. He was doing some fascinating AI work, mostly in vision. I ran across his Medium pages today. Great stuff from a guy who has a no-nonsense approach and a good grip on both the theoretical and practical aspects of the technology.

Eugenio Culurciello