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.
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.
Should have gone with the real AI solution: Actually Indian
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.
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.
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).
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.
Give me 5000 nuggets and bacon on muh ice cream.
drives away
Add that breakfast sauce as well. Or Big Mac sauce, your option.
1: Does IBM even have an LLM that would be considered “good” these days? Maybe they do, but I haven’t heard about it.
2: If this was in 2019, no wonder it flopped. Only very recently have we gotten to a point where this should’ve even been considered (and then, in my opinion given the current state of LLMs, dismissed).
3: More than 100 stores were testing this?? Did they not think to start with like, one store and see if that worked at all?
4: While a short-lived victory, this is still a win for people that rely on these jobs. Good for them.
Everybody do what I do.
“Hi, this is the virtual assistant. In a few words please describe what I can help with.”
“IvRjcsha^&@■♡●jzjcbsj”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.”
“IvRjcsha^&@■♡●jzjcbsj”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.”
“IvRjcsha^&@■♡●jzjcbsj”
“I’m sorry we’re having difficulties. Let me connect you with someone who can help”
Fuck off AI.
No LLMs were involved, as far as the available information goes.
Speech recognition has existed far before 2019.
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?
Turns out customers weren’t ordering the McDeadly neurotoxin
Isn’t this just voice recognition software?
deleted by creator
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?”
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.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to just drop the speakers and make them use mobile apps only?
No, that would involve telling people to use a cellphone in a running car. Massive liability
…which is why I park first at the chain before I order. You right its a liability, but they’re gonna run out of options if they can’t afford someone to run the speaker, be it AI, someone in a call center, or the restaurant.
Why would they not be able to afford someone…? And run out of “options”…?
Not if the car is stopped. Here’s how it should work:
- park in a “drive-thru” stall
- scan QR code specific to that stall (optional - connect to wifi at the stall)
- enter order through a simple webapp
- worker brings order out
If you want to talk to someone, walk inside, no need for a drive-thru window at all. That’s basically how the old drive-ins worked, adjusted for modern tools.
You know I am good with just getting my ass out of the car and walking a short distance to get my 4000 calorie meal. I am fine without implementing an entire protocol
It’s the same as the order pickup they have, just with info about what stall you’re in. That’s really it, and it would allow eliminating the entire drive-thru experience, along with all the car idling and whatnot.
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
