Artificial Intelligence is taking over the world’s most cursed task

She introduced herself Like Eve, but Ben knew immediately that the voice on the other end of the line was a robot. Eve knew his name. She also knew how much money he owed his previous landlord ($266). She apparently did not know that he had settled with a collection agency five months earlier. Eve said she was an AI agent from ProCollect and was calling to collect a debt. “Would you like to resolve the issue today via card or bank transfer?” I asked.

Ben had stepped outside on a mild April afternoon in Portland, Oregon, to take the phone call. (He asked WIRED to use a pseudonym so he could speak freely about a financial matter.) As he stood in the sun, he wondered what he would say to get Eve to hand off a call to a human. “I thought it was just insulting someone when I asked about the payment structure or something more technical,” he says. But Eve stayed on the line, and so did Ben. He decided – why not? – To mess with the robot a little.

Ben says he asked the robot to take on some roles, as he was “just a little guy” and Dinah was like a giantess who tended to run over him. He wanted to see how strange Eve was. He says the robot continued to play hesitantly for a few minutes, but then suddenly shoved it into a call center employee. The human agent did not reveal whether he overheard Ben’s strange conversation with the AI. But they quickly cleared up the confusion: “They looked me up in the system,” he recalls. “I found that the balance was zero.”

Ben’s experience is becoming increasingly common. With inflation and stagnant salaries weighing on pocketbooks, debt defaults have led to the United States It is swollen. “We have, right now, the largest amount of collections in court I’ve ever seen,” says debt settlement expert Michael Bovey.

At a time when an unprecedented number of people are struggling to repay their debts, companies seeking debt repayment are turning to technology to enhance their efforts. Many of the calls, emails, texts and messages people receive asking for money are now carried out by AI agents. Their tone may be respectful, even fawning, but they never get out of control. They also never sleep. Their advantage comes from tenacity and size. that analysis Collection agency Kaplan Group estimates that debt collectors using artificial intelligence will be a nearly $16 billion industry over the next decade.

AI proponents often assert that as automation becomes more sophisticated, humanity has a rare opportunity to eliminate the world’s worst jobs. Working in a call center really sucks. Working in a call center specifically to chase people for money adds to the misery. CareerExplorer professional matching platform Rows Debt collection in bottom 1% of occupations for job satisfaction. As much as debt collectors hate their jobs, people also hate debt collectors. When the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau first started accepting complaints about debt collection, this was… receive 11,000 within six months, putting it behind the mortgage industry as the financial service that has generated the most outrage.

If there was any employment sector that could collapse without a lot of fanfare about job losses, it might be this one. For a robot like Eve, what would it take to beat the least popular people on Earth?

To get To better deal with Eve’s abilities, I decided to contact her myself.

But when I tried the number Ben gave me, a ProCollect employee answered. I defined myself as a journalist. They told me there was no one to answer my questions and suggested I call back the next day. When I did, another person told me that the company doesn’t use AI but that I should also talk to HR. HR asked me to email my questions, which I did. One of my questions: Where did Eve come from?