- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@zerobytes.monster
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@zerobytes.monster
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
McDonald’s is removing artificial intelligence (AI) powered ordering technology from its drive-through restaurants in the US, after customers shared its comical mishaps online.
A trial of the system, which was developed by IBM and uses voice recognition software to process orders, was announced in 2019.
It has not proved entirely reliable, however, resulting in viral videos of bizarre misinterpreted orders ranging from bacon-topped ice cream to hundreds of dollars’ worth of chicken nuggets.
You must log in or register to comment.
Wasn’t this just voice recognition for orders? We’ve been doing this for years without it being called AI, but I guess now the marketing people are in charge
A computer: does anything.
Tech journalists: is this AI?
Voice recognition is “AI“*, it even uses the same technical architecture as the most popular applications of AI - Artificial neural networks.
* - depending on the definition of course.
Well, given that we’re calling pretty much anything AI these days, it probably fits.
But I honestly don’t consider static models to be “AI,” I only consider it “AI” if it actively adjusts the model as it operates. Everything else is some specific field, like NLP, ML, etc. If it’s not “learning,” it’s just a statistical model that gets updated periodically.
New stuff gets called AI until it is useful, then we call it something else.
You know what they call alternative medicine when it works? Medicine.
Tim Minchin reference?
It’s more than voice recognition, since it must also parse a wide variety of sentence structure into a discreet order, as well as answer questions.
Honestly, it doesn’t need to be that complex:
- X <menu item> [<ala carte | combo meal>]
- extra <topping>
- <size> <soda brand>
There’s probably a dozen or so more, but it really shouldn’t need to understand natural language, it can just work off keywords.
You can do that kind of imposed structure if it’s an internal tool used by employees. But if the public is using it, it has better be able to parse whatever the consumer is saying. Somebody will say “I want a burger and a coke, but hold the mustard. And add some fries. No make it two of each.” And it won’t fit your predefined syntax.
Idk, you could probably just show the grammar on the screen, and also allow manual entry (if insider) or fallback to a human.
That way you’d get errors (sorry, I didn’t understand that) instead of wrong orders with a pretty high degree of confidence. As long as there’s a fallback, it should be fine.
Anyway, that’s my take. I’m probably wrong though since I don’t deal with retail customers.
Ah yes, give me more companies using AI, trying to replace their employees and then realizing it doesn’t work
How come Walmart gets shit for self checkout but McDonald’s doesn’t get absolutely fucking roasted for Ai
I honestly prefer self-checkout. I may not be as fast as the cashier, but I am reasonably fast and I don’t have to talk to anyone.
I’d probably feel the same about fast food orders. I don’t think the same self-checkout system would work, but I’d probably use my phone if it was easy and I didn’t need a special app. Just let me scan a code and enter my order from a parking lot space. That way I still don’t need to talk to anyone, no issues with crappy mics or AI, etc. I’m guessing everyone would be happier (workers don’t need to intuit crackly mics, I can check if it comes with pickles, etc).
Hey, McDonalds, I got a general AI that can understand human speech.
It’s located between my neck and the top of my head, and it costs $25/hr for fuel consumption.
Should have gone with the real AI solution: Actually Indian
That’s what Tim Hortons did in Canada!
Like, the drive through connects to some Indian call center?
No, they hire a lot of temporary foreign workers from India.
As someone who works with a few Indians, I’m a fan. They’re hard-working and reasonably easy to understand. Can’t be worse than AI, in any case.
Amazon!
These large companies really need to learn that AI isn’t a good tool for black and white decisions.
Right now I’m working on a system with drones and image recognition for farmers to prioritise where to use pesticides, in order to decrease the use of pesticides in the EU. For these things AI systems work really well, since it’s just prioritising regions.
It’s a bad idea to use it to make discrete decisions.
The problem is that they are just slapping a general use AI onto this and trying to call it a day. Had they created a completely custom model using exclusively recordings of drive-thru interactions it probably would have gone just fine
Unfortunately this is possible.
I think it’s for the better that companies are having these blunders though. It’ll generate some amount of pushback and keep AI from taking over workplaces.
I disagree. Classification in combintion wo ith a confidence score is a viable use case for AI.
you know that the confidence value is generated by the ai itself right? So it could still spew out bullshit with high confidence. The confidence score doesn’t really help much
But the same holds for regression, which you seem to favour. So why do you feel that regression is so much better than classification (which is, when combined with a confidence score, basically regression)?
You can tell the exec who greenlit this was a boomer because they went with IBM.
An AI drive through was always going to be difficult. IBM simply isn’t the company that can do stuff like that anymore, and they haven’t been for decades at this point.
“Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM” - or something like that. It’s still a great defense when things go bust and they probably knew they would.
Around that time, Watson was the most public demonstration of AI.
Voice recognition vs. Download an app where you can’t make mistakes (and a giant corporation can harvest your data). Hmm, I wonder which mcway mcdonalds will go?
“Will you be using our app today?”
Isn’t this just voice recognition software?
AI is going the same way as self-driving cars…
It has the power to bring such amazing change, but greed is poisoning the technology, and it’s being weaponized against the lower and middle class in disguising ways.
Shoutout to Elon for fucking up self driving cars by releasing cheap, imitation technology after his competitors spent literal decades carefully testing and perfecting genuine solutions.
Greed is why we can’t have nice things… Everyone should be angrier about this stuff.
AI is and always has been a bullshit technology. Its no where near as capable as its proponents in tech industry have been claiming. Its all driven by greed to feed into a stock price frenzy but its the emperor’s new clothes. In the future it may be something useful but at present even the tools that exist are unreliable and broken.
Self Drive Cars is different, very much a Tesla issue rather than generalised. Tesla has a first move advantage but then Elon Musk blew it by forcing his engineers to cut back on sensors and tech to save money because he knows best. Other self drive manufacturers are doing well and even have licenses to test their fully featured systems in multiple locations.
AI is a generally crap technology (maybe in the future it will be something useful). Self Drive is a generally myself up technology, except at Tesla where they went for the crap unworkable version.
Self-driving cars are AI. And they are butting against the Pareto Principle.
has the power to bring such amazing change
Everyone where told me it was fake marketing hype.
I love how the enemy is all powerful and easily defeatable at the same time. LLMs are singularity creating AIs, useless, hallucinating, job destroyers, potentially do everything, all at once.
Maybe different people are saying those different things.
Sure. It’s all an opinion. That makes sense. Thank you for explaining how it isn’t based on logic, data, or really any methodology at all. Just people arguing chocolate or vanilla or strawberry ice cream.
Everything is an opinion. You’re making bets on future outcomes.
That doesn’t mean that no one knows what they’re talking about.
No. Everything is not an opinion. There is the real universe.
You’re projecting the future. It fundamentally cannot be factual. It’s a guess. Some guesses (that LLMs are a deeply flawed technology) come from a place of understanding how shit works that other guesses (LLMs are magic) don’t, but the actual future impact of the tech inherently must be an opinion, regardless of how well informed it is. There is no objective truth.
(All of this is without the fact that very little of the past is super concrete either. We know specific things happened with relatively high certainty, but why is, again, always a guess.)
There is no objective truth.
Hmm is this a true statement no matter what people think of it?
Bubble burst?
I got my fried shoes but no ketchup!
Would this even be necessary for automated ordering anyway? Given that every company under the sun wants you to use some app of theirs these days, including fast food companies, Im kinda surprised they dont just get rid of the speaker/microphone system, and just put a sign with a qr code in front of the drive through telling you to download and use their app to put in a drive through order
Provided they’re fine with cutting off 100% of their business coming from customers older than 50, that’d probably work great. I don’t think they’re quite there yet.
Here in Canada at least they have both at the moment. You can use the drive thru as usual or order through the app and give them a code at the drive thru or just park in a numbered spot and have them bring it out to you without ever talking to someone
I saw a video of someone just trying to pick up in the drive thru after ordering through the app. The location did not have the numbered spots to use. The AI thing wouldn’t let them continue lol. It’s like McDonald’s doesn’t even fully understand their own systems in place.
Are they also going to remove the human order takers due to number of errors or…. Because they never get shit right, then I correct them, then the kitchen kids get it wrong, occasionally i go back around to ask for it as I ordered, and sometimes the second time around it’s correct
It’s like those self service kiosks they have. The first version was broken most of the time, but they got the bugs worked out and after that those kiosks were everywhere.
I don’t know which versions I’ve used but I’ve never had a problem with them. The only thing that was confusing is it seemed like it was forcing me to upgrade to a medium combo but they do this in the drive thru too. It may be that they don’t have small combos. I wish fast food services would standardize on size terminology. Where’s ISO and ANSI when I need them for actually useful things.
Here’s what you do: You have the AI take the order, but the human checks each item. They’ll have enough time to work out the kinks
That is then not a technology ready for mass use. That would be McDonalds paying IBM to let it beta test (or alpha test it seems) its software for them.
And the only way to check the order would be to listen to each order and confirm the order is correct - so totally duplicating the AI’s job. It then becomes “what’s the point” for McDonalds?
AI tools at present are broken and not fit for purpose.
AI is a crapshoot, agree. But there has to be more testing before PR disasters like this happen. That isn’t “being my suppliers beta test”, rather sensible project managers not mindlessly putting it out there because the supplier said it worked. Now people are laughing at McDonald’s on top of their cost saving operations being delayed. But I agree overall that AI sucks to replace humans. I’m just criticizing McDonald’s jumping the gun
It’s because everyone is trying to use generic models for every task which is obviously terrible. If you create a custom, naroscope model, you can do some surprising things. But that takes knowledgeable employees, time, and money, none of which companies want to do. Train ann llm exclusively on recordings of drive-thru interactions and it would probably end up being quite good at it.
I mean it wouldn’t hurt to also use some microphones that don’t sound worse than Dollar Store Windows 98 white beige desktop microphone but that’s a different conversation
You don’t need or benefit from an LLM.
You just need voice recognition that works properly.
And the only way to check the order would be to listen to each order and confirm the order is correct - so totally duplicating the AI’s job.
Lol, they do this already with humans, and have done so for more than a decade. Back when I worked in the MCD kitchen, wed always have someone with the drive thru headset on to hear what’s coming and to make sure the back drive drone wasn’t a complete moron (like the kid [hired before me] who in all seriousness asked me if there was bacon on a BLT, then completely missed the sarcasm in a drawn out “Noooooooo” and proceeded to tell the customer 🙄)
