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.
“McDonalds removes AI drive-throughs after they realized AI is fucking stupid and shouldn’t be used by anyone”
There, fixed. Now can we fucking kill AI and make it illegal to use already? Fuck this shit.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🙄)
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
I used this system more than I care to admit and never had significant problems with it. My biggest issue was when trying to modify an existing item on the ticket.
