Is Artificial Intelligence A Problem For Minnesota Ticket Winners?

We have recently just celebrated the five-year anniversary of when the world when into shut down mode for covid. Honestly, it seems like a whole lot longer than five years. We thought we would never feel normal again, but how quickly we got back to the way things used to be, or very close to it. 

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Like a lot of industries, the ticket industry came to a screeching halt with no events or games to sell tickets to. As we have gotten back to our normal way of life, the ticket industry has not. 

What I mean by that is they fired nearly all of their employees and now have AI (artificial intelligence) doing the job that real people used to do. If you’ve have won any tickets, heck even bought any tickets, you know that nearly everything is “digital” now.  

When you win most tickets from our radio stations, we have to email those “digital” tickets to you. For someone who doesn’t have an email address, things get a bit tricky, because your email has your link to download your tickets to your phone so it can be scanned when you enter. 

This week we have been giving away tickets to the “Frozen Faceoff” at the X-Cel Energy Center in St. Paul Friday and Saturday. As I was sending the tickets to our last winner, I noticed something "not very intelligent" about their artificial intelligence. It did not recognize our winner's first name.  

His name is Bryan with a “y”. The message I kept getting was something to the effect of “not an actual name”. I thought maybe I had a space before the name? Checked that, nope that wasn't it. I deleted the name and completely retyped it, same message. Not an actual name!

Maybe it doesn’t recognize the “y” in Bryan, so I spelled Brian with an “i”. I got the same message, not an actual name. Typically, I would say this was a “me” problem, because my super-power seems to be fooling spell check.  

After several minutes of carefully, slowly typing his name, I got the same message every time. At this point, I’m really frustrated, and I just tried “B.” and it worked. I’m not sure how that went through when two real spellings of some one's name wouldn’t.  

This made me think about something else when it comes to these tickets, maybe they really do just disappear when we send them.  

Allow me to explain more. When we actually get the tickets sent with names or abbreviations of names that AI understands, we often hear from listeners that they did not get their tickets. Nearly every time we do a giveaway, we hear this.  

Typically, we think that the listener didn’t check their spam folder or some other folder in their email. Often times the email with come from the venue or ticket distributor, and we assume the listener was looking for an email from the radio station they won from and deleted the email from the venue or ticket distributor. 

As long as the tickets have not been claimed by the winner, we can electronically cancel the ticket transfer and resend them again. That always works.   

Maybe winners aren’t missing the tickets in their email or deleting a message they don’t recognize? I mean if the “intelligence” we use to transfer the tickets can’t recognize the name Bryan, are we sure we trust it to transfer the tickets properly to begin with? 

Now that things have improved from 2020, can we not just go back to actual tickets and stop trusting “intelligence” that doesn’t understand one of the most normal names in the English language?