For Debt About It The rise of AI coincides with all-time debt highs — and one startup is looking use an AI-powered goon to shake folks down for cash faster than a human debt collector ever could. As Vice reports, the an outfit called Skit.AI is looking to usher in a “new era of debt collections” with an AI-powered voice agent that does just that, making millions of outbound collections calls a week. A sort of machine learning answer to robocalling, Skit and its competitors offer, in essence, the same basic promise that all other companies jumping on the AI bandwagon claim to provide: the ability to do more menial tasks than humans, more efficiently and at a significantly cheaper cost. “It is hard to find a skilled collector, and having a consistent team that can scale up when needed has been extremely challenging,” a barf-worthy Skit blog post reads. “But instant scalability with Digital Collection Agents, the dependence on human collectors goes down substantially. The end-to-end automation of many calls means that human agents are no longer required to do those calls. So a collector can manage a larger portfolio with a smaller or the same team of agents.” Insult to Injury In reality, of course, the still-experimental nature of chatbots means that these sorts of AI-based services are basically being beta tested in real-time, often resulting in failure or being regulated out of existence. As Timnit Gebru of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) told Vice, there’s an additional layer of…Cursed New AI Calls Debtors to Hassle Them for Money