Is AI Taking Over More And More USPS Functions From Humans?

Once is an outlier, but twice becomes suspicious. Once upon a time, minor typos in addresses weren't a huge problem, as knowledgeable clerks/carriers would route the items correctly, knowing what the sender's intent was.

I've had 2 cases in the last week now where letters were returned to me as undeliverable, and I cannot believe that a human couldn't figure out where they should go.

I posit that AI has been interjected into the sorting systems at hubs with algorithms so tight that they are marking items as undeliverable before they get to humans at the destination post offices.

In the 2 cases in question, the dealer mailing list posted on the CHICAGOPEX website contained typos, so my wantlist letters to 2 recipients (thus far) have been returned with yellow "not deliverable as addressed, unable to forward" labels.

Case #1. The address as printed:




What it should have been:




So the street number, city, state, and zip were all correct, just a single letter L instead of double in the street name caused it to be underliverable. This would not have happened had a human looked at it.


Case #2. The address as printed:




What it should have been:




So a mispelling of one letter in the city name... but shouldn't the zip code have been enough to overcome the typo?

I've even had a 9 digit ZIP returned because of a typo in the street address (or in my case a hando).

my APS mag still comes in missing a building designation letter after the digits.

Whatever system USPS is currently using, it's garbage. I constantly have ebay lots addressed to me get returned to sender in Germany for a bad address, and the address is 100% correct and perfectly readable. I don't think a single human is involved in the process until it reaches my local PO.

I, agree with simple, if my regular carrier has off the day my mag arrives back it goes.

IMO it is likely to do with AI. I mean, have you ever read the AI roll-up comments of Amazon reviews? It is bad. really bad. It has a long way to go. I used to send and receive letters that were not very well addressed, and they always made it. My sent letters were the worst.

It also could indicate the deployment of better OCR software, but without fuzzy matching when the OCR'd address is compared to the address database. Thus, sharper address reading, but dumb or dumber lookup algorithms that require only an exact match.The cynic in me says that could be intentional to allow USPS to do less work for the price of a stamp and force repayment when the address is corrected.

My mail matter is always returned to sender when it happens to hit the post office down the road rather than mine. One employee there would hit as undeliverable/not forwardable and return to sender. The address was perfect, But they just did not wish to bother taking the trouble to get it down the road. After years the clerk was figured out and caught.

I wouldn't describe rejection of an address because it is off by one character as "AI", in fact, I would describe it as the opposite of AI. One of the components of AI is machine learning. A proper AI system would be able to be trained to recognize patterns and variants of how common street names are actually rendered by fallible humans who sometimes misspell things. This sounds more like a really poorly implemented algorithm based on a literal string compare. Probably case sensitive also. Reminds me of how computers used to work 20-30 years when you had to type the exact thing it was expecting or else it would go berserk.

BTW I asked ChatGPT some questions about Zionzville(sic) and it did pretty well. Recognized the typo, explained it, and corrected for it. Better than most human USPS workers probably. The USPS clerk at my post office doesn't know how many ounces are in a pound. The bar is pretty low these days.

As others have more or less said, the typos might not be at fault at all. I regularly send cards to a certain address, and several months ago one was returned as undeliverable. I thought I must have written a digit wrong in the street number or the zip code, but I checked it closely and there were no errors -- the exact same address I've used successfully many times before and since. I think the post office is just getting flaky.

The average machineable letter-sized mail piece or flat will never be seen as an individual item until your carrier is at your box. Carriers are receiving the bulk of their mail in delivery-sequenced trays.
It is highly likely these modern returns are happening during automated processing steps, and *not* at the final carrier level.
I recently had the opportunity to tour a large post office's back-room floor and see their new parcel sorter which ultimately filled bins for each carrier. Quite amazing to watch..
Conversely, the letter-mail was trayed-up for the carriers 80 miles away.