The voice recognition system seems not to have recognised what customers were really ordering.

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.

  • shotgun_crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Ah yes, give me more companies using AI, trying to replace their employees and then realizing it doesn’t work

    • SendMePhotos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      How come Walmart gets shit for self checkout but McDonald’s doesn’t get absolutely fucking roasted for Ai

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        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).

  • TrippyFocus@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    In one video, which has 30,000 views on TikTok, a young woman becomes increasingly exasperated as she attempts to convince the AI that she wants a caramel ice cream, only for it to add multiple stacks of butter to her order.

    Lmao didn’t even know you could add butter to something at McDonald’s. If you can’t then it’s even funnier it decided that’s a thing.

  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      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.

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          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.

          • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            Everything is an opinion. You’re making bets on future outcomes.

            That doesn’t mean that no one knows what they’re talking about.

              • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                0·
                5 months ago

                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.)

  • gentooer@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.