this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
442 points (97.4% liked)

Technology

59192 readers
2513 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Wouldn't it make more sense to just drop the speakers and make them use mobile apps only?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (4 children)

No, that would involve telling people to use a cellphone in a running car. Massive liability

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

...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.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (12 children)

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.

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

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 🙄)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

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

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 46 points 4 months ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

New stuff gets called AI until it is useful, then we call it something else.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You know what they call alternative medicine when it works? Medicine.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 42 points 4 months ago (1 children)

A computer: does anything.

Tech journalists: is this AI?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

"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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

Show us on this doll where the AI touched you

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Around that time, Watson was the most public demonstration of AI.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

"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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 52 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Should have gone with the real AI solution: Actually Indian

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

That's what Tim Hortons did in Canada!

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 77 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (2 children)

They have butter for their hot cakes. Sounds like it was adding butter packets to the order.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (2 children)

For other items they’ll also do butter… and whatever this crap is:

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Ahh I forgot about breakfast, that makes more sense. I was picturing butter drenched fires lol.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Ngl dipping the fries into their breakfast butter is so delicious and bad

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›