Hertz' AI System That Scans for "Damage" on Rental Cars Is Turning Into an Epic Disaster
Hertz' AI System That Scans for "Damage" on Rental Cars Is Turning Into an Epic Disaster
It's on brand. I pity the fool that doesn't know hertz is a fucked up rental agency
They charged me for a broken windshield, which I paid and then wouldn't provide me a receipt for my insurance company. Then to top it off, they turned me into a collections agency because they said I didn't pay for the windshield. I will never rent from them again.
And I will take this as my cue to mention that Hertz, Dollar and Thrifty are all the same company and they will each of them take every opportunity possible to fuck you.
They're all rather shitty tbh, with some regional variation
I will bring this up again like I did my last post concerning Hertz.
While I was in Albuquerque, NM getting off the Amtrak train, I reserved our rental car from their website and went to the nonexistent address with no phone number or anything. After half an hour we called another Hertz and they basically told us to piss off and call the location we booked the car. I have few brands that I boycott and now they will be Nestle products (and sub companies) and Hertz.
Nestle products (and sub companies)
That's a tall order. And just to be clear, not saying we should just give up against those numbers. It's not an all-or-nothing situation.
The term AI itself is a shifting of goalposts. What was AI 50 years ago* is now AGI, so we can call this shit AI though it's nothing of the sort. And everybody's falling for the hype: governments, militaries, police forces, care providers, hospitals... not to speak of the insane amounts of energy & resources this wastes, and other highly problematic, erm, problems. What a fucking disaster.
If it wasn't for those huge caveats I'd be all for it. Use it for what it can do (which isn't all that much), research it. But don't fall for the shit some tech bro envisions for us.
tbf fucking around with that term probably isn't a new thing either, and science itself is divided on how to define it.
It's also the other way around. What was called AI in the past is now called bots. Simple algorithms that approximate the appearance of intelligence like even the earliest chess engines, for instance, were also called AI.
And all those uses are correct, because AI is a broad field. We should just use the more specific terms these days though: machine learning, LLM, Bayesian networks, etc.
True! I was refering to some stricltly scientific definitions but of course there's always been popular/broader ones.
What was AI 50 years ago is now AGI,
You’re not wrong, but that’s also a bit misleading. “AI” is all-encompassing while terms like AGI and ASI are subsets. From the 1950s onward AI was expected to evolve quickly as computing evolved, that never happened. Instead, AI mostly topped out with decision trees, like those used for AI in videogames. ML pried the field back open, but not in the ways we expected.
AGI and ASI were coined in the early 2000s to set apart the goal of human-level intelligence from other kinds of AI like videogame AI. This is a natural result of the field advancing in unexpected, divergent directions. It’s not meant to move the goal post, but to clarify future goals against past progress.
It is entirely possible that we develop multiple approaches to AGI that necessitate new terminology to differentiate them. It’s the nature of all evolution, including technology and language.
The current situation is a bubble based on an over hyped extension of the cloud compute boom. Nearly a trillion dollars of capital expenditure over the past 5 years from major tech companies chasing down this white whale and filling up new data centers with Nvidia GPUs. With revenue caping out at maybe 45 billion annually across all of them for “AI” products and services, and that’s before even talking about ongoing operation costs such as power for the data centers, wages for people working on them, or the wages of people working to develop services to run on them.
None of this is making any fucking profit, and every attempt to find new revenue ether increases their costs even more or falls flat on its face the moment it is actually shipped. No one wants to call it out at higher levels because NVIDIA is holding up the whole fucking stock market right now, and them crashing out because everyone stoped buying new GPUs will hurt everyone else’s growth narrative.
We called the basic movement of the grabbers in Defender AI to distinguish it from the fixed movement of Space Invaders. We still call that AI in modern videogames.
I am 0% surprised that Hertz would be the first in the US to roll this out. Expecting a Steve Lehto YouTube video about it within the next three days ...
He's already done 3 that I know of
Oh, so Hertz has gotten wise to... every online platform that exists: Outsourcing all responsibility for their user-hostile bullshit to some vague "system" that cannot be held accountable.
I'm so sorry but the advertised cost has doubled because... Computer says so! No, sir, there's nothing I can do, sir, you see it's the system.
And you can't go anywhere else, because everyone else is doing it (or soon will be) too!
just wait till they start denying health insurance with it
I'm sorry ma'am I know you're upset, but the AI said it's not covered. The AI is numbers, and numbers don't lie.
United Health is way ahead of you. 1000 use cases, they tout. it's one of the things that lead to the luigi-ing.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/unitedhealth-now-has-1-000-ai-use-cases-including-in-claims-f3387ca3
Do they already not do that? They just call it "the computer".
Oh, this is a thing. It's called an accountability sink.
There is a really interesting book called the unaccountability machine by Rory Sutherland (if my memory is working). Worth a read
I'd ask for the stupid AI scanning system to scan my car before I agree to renting it. Once they sign off on the 'all clear' notification from their AI scanner before rental, then I'd consider renting it .... but after reading this headline, I'd probably just tell them, I'm spending a few hundred dollars more on renting a car from someone else.
You should also ask for a copy of the pictures or videos it takes while scanning so you can reference when returning.
And they will totally provide those to you, no problem.
Just spit balling here, but they probably tune the AI for different thresholds between return and rent out so that they can rake in the damage fees for things that "weren't there" during the first AI scan.
Sounds like that shit with dodgy smoking detection in a hotel from last week..
Yup intentionally using dogy tools to extract more money from people under false pretenses, at this point I'm boycotting any company that claims to use AI, fuck em all
Those do exactly what they're supposed to do. They're even explicitly advertised as providing new revenue streams.
I get why they'd use something like this to save money and time but, is suspect that correct use would include a human check before charging people.
We need to start pushing for laws on this kind of thing. Automated checks are fine if you, as the company, trust they won't have too many false negatives. If you aren't checking for false positives, though, you should be heavily fined for each false report. $25,000 per false report sounds like a good place to start. Hopefully that would be large enough to not just be the cost of doing business.
Never rent a car from Hertz, check.
Hertz has also called the cops on their customers for a variety of asinine reasons.
I steer clear of them and Enterprise (Enterprise has been working the whole shaft for ICE).
Okay so...in the rare event I need to rent a car, any suggestions on who to use that isn't Hertz and sister companies?
I've had a lot of good recent experiences with Enterprise (in the US). There's some interesting services like Turo, but I can't bring myself to try it yet. Weirdly too personal being other people's cars.
Enterprise and Alamo is owned by the same family which means they aren’t beholden to public shareholders. Usually this means the company is ran better and not as haphazardly as public ones tend to be.
I imagine Turo is now very similar to AirBnB in most areas, as in these are dedicated rentals, just owned by individuals instead of chains.
I recently used Avis, they were totally cromulent.
Plus they are worshipped as a god in some sectors of the universe.
I used Avis in a different state for a short car rental and they sent me a hefty bill for some kind of damage below the vehicle a couple months after returning it.
I refused to pay and will refuse to use them ever again. Your mileage may vary.
Avis is terrible.
I rent through Costco and try to pick Alamo when possible. Avis is decent but they often share a line with Budget which can take forever.
I’m not a loyalty member of any brand for reference.
SIXT and TURO. Maybe price out renting the big truck from Lowe's/home depot. Or a haul. Both might be cheaper than hertz/enterprise depending on your area.
Sixt is specifically called out as AI lying about damages in Germany.
Enterprise has been good.
You mean an LLM that doesn't have the ability to understand context fails to make decisions that require context to do properly? Shocking /s
Except they are using computer vision, not an LLM
what do you think is driving the image recognition take that comes from the computer vision hardware?
it's an LLM.
https://www.chooch.com/blog/how-to-integrate-large-language-models-with-computer-vision/
Aivis. Trai harder.
Hertz is a ripoff and a hassle and little else
"AI is a disaster." Fixed it for you.
Fair game. Give me a grease pen and let me mark everything I see. By the time I'm done, they'll owe me money.
They know it doesn't work this is just a cash grab by rental car companies hoping to squeeze extra profit knowing most people won't fight it under the guise of digital transformation.
No. Shit.
I think it's generally a brilliant solution but there are a couple of problems here:
Sounds to me like they're just trying to replace those employees. That's why they won't let them interfere.
I'm not sure how you can make the points you make, and still call it a "generally brilliant solution"
The entire point of this system - like anything a giant company like Hertz does - is not to be fair to the customer. The point is to screw the customer over to make money.
Not allowing human employees to challenge the incorrect AI decision is very intentional, because it defers your complaint to a later time when you have to phone customer support.
This means you no longer have the persuasion power of being there in person at the time of the assessment, with the car still there too, and means you have to muster the time and effort to call customer services - which they are hoping you won't bother doing. Even if you do call, CS hold all the cards at that point and can easily swerve you over the phone.
It's all part of the business strategy.
That's why you chargeback. Don't waste time arguing with the machine, cut it off at the cashflow
Because the technology itself is not the problem, it's the application. Not complicated.
It's really funny here. There already exists software that does this stuff. It's existed for quite a while. I personally know a software engineer that works at a company that creates this stuff. It's sold to insurance companies. Hertz version must just totally suck.
It's designed to suck.
The US lacks even the most basic consumer protections it seems.
In Australia, companies still try to give you the run around, but I am extremely confident this wouldn't fly here. Even though I'm not a lawyer.
If you literally can't get a hold of them, they're breaking Australian Consumer Law, that's a slam dunk to charge back the card and dare them to take you to your state's relevant tribunal that hears cases like this. It costs either like $70 to file, you can represent yourself easily, and if you're low-income, it's literally free.
They don't want to waste money on fighting you. If you're confident you're clearly in the right, it's very easy to get a company to back down.
This is a great time to remind everyone to take photos before and after getting a rental car, because otherwise it's your word against them.
You are spot on here. AI is great for sensitivity (noticing potential issues), but terrible for specivity (giving many false positives).
The issue is how AI is used, not the AI itself. They don't have a human in the checking process. They should use AI scanner to check the car. If it's fine, then you have saved the employee from manually checking, which is a time-consuming process and prone to error.
If the AI spots something, then get an employee to look at the issues highlighted. If it's just a water drop or other false positive, then it should be a one click 'ignore', and the customer goes on their way without charge. If it is genuine, then show the evidence to the customer and discuss charges in person. Company still saves time over a manual check and has much improved accuracy and evidence collection.
They are being greedy by trying to eliminate the employee altogether. This probably doesn't actually save any money, if anything it costs more in dealing with complaints, not to mention the loss of sales due to building a poor image.
Exactly. Not only that but the human is more likely to overlook some things. It also creates a digital record of the complete condition.
Have the AI go over the vehicle, being insanely meticulous and then pass that info off to a human who verifies any flagged damages in a couple of seconds and makes decisions about what needs to be charged.
Combining the 2 improves efficiency and accuracy.
AI is not uniqely prone to false positives; in this case, it's being used deliberately to produce them.