theres a cute programm, call the goblin chef.
if you feed it ingredients, along with amounts, and numbers of people to cook for, it spits out some neat recipes.
But it specifically warns you that it cant actually taste things. If you list ice and bacon, it'll probably combine those two into a dish. (although now i doesnt recognize "one fresh kitten" as an ingredient anymore q.q)
They can whine about unscrupulous pitchmen all they want, but at some point, unethical behavior goes so far above and beyond that it becomes impressive.
I hope that whoever convinced McDonald’s to agree to this crap back in 2019 got an award and an obscenely gigantic commission.
IBM has been doing (actually legitimate) business "AI" stuff with Watson forever.
They fucked up here because LLMs are at best part of an interface for the language processing portion and letting them anywhere near the actual business logic of setting up an order is insane, but partnering with IBM for "AI" isn't dumb at all.
You get out ahead of the locomotive knowing that most of the directions you go aren't going to pan out. The point is that the guy who happens to pick correctly will win big by getting out there first. Nothing wrong with making the attempt and getting it wrong, as long as you factored that risk in (as McDonalds' seems to have done given that this hasn't harmed them).
The thing most companies are missing is to design the AI experience. What happens when it fails? Are we making options available for those who want a standard experience? Do we even have an elegant feedback loop to mark when it fails? Are we accounting for different pitches and accents? How about speech impediments?
I'm a designer focusing on AI, but a lot of companies haven't even realized they need a designer for this. It's like we're the conscience of tech, and listened to about as often.
Mc Donald's already has customer self serve kiosks and mobile apps with the full menu that limit you as to which items you can add or remove.
How did they screw this up and leave things open ended for the LLM?
IE why was the LLM not referencing a list of valid options with every request and then replying with what the possible options are. This is something LLMs are actually able to do fairly well, then layer on top the EXACT same HARD constraints they already have on the kiosk and mobile app to ensure orders are valid?
Natural language is really messy.. Could go through many variants on things. Then you get text to speech issues due to audio quality / accents.. And you need an engine that can "best guess / best match" based on what it has or ask for clarification.
Similarly you can ask for TWO of a complex thing: I would like Two.... meals, with,,, XXXX
That's the joke. Nearly every proposed implementation of AI isn't actually solving a real business or tech problem. It's just the next snake oil, like block chain, quantum computing, etc. There are real, valid use cases for all of those things. But most companies have no idea what they really are, how they might help, and even if they could help, what it would take to implement to see real results.
Because most people, including those implementing this shit, have no idea how LLMs work, or their limitations. I see it every day at my job. I have given up trying to patiently explain why they are having issues.
After I've seen videos of how infrequently those machines are cleaned, and the ice machines for their drinks too, I just don't want anything from these fast food places.
Basically mold growing inside the deep to clean areas, which never get accessed, and then you trust a bunch of immature teenagers to clean to a proper specification?
Same for the big metal tea dispensers. I had some very nasty looking stuff come out of one of those while filling up a cup one time and it made me never trust fast food drinks again.
I used to not think it was much of a problem, because the people running the restaurant I worked at in highschool and college put such a strong emphasis on keeping everything clean so it never even croased crossed my mind that things could be that bad.
When I was a teenager, we put vodka into the shamrock shake mix, because "it wasn't irish enough".
Big hit with the local teens who frequented our mall McDonalds. How we got away with no criminal charges, now that I'm thinking about it 20+ years later, I have NO idea. I was 16 at the time. I think even the shift leader was only 19. And no matter what age we were, we were still knowingly selling alcoholic drinks to minors.
The only one I ever made up an excuse for, is when this mom wanted a shake for her 7 year old. THAT one I was like "Uhhhhhh, ya know what? Our shake machine is actually broken......yep........ignore the employees behind me serving shakes from it right now."
She started yelling at me for discriminating against her, and being a lazy employee. Alright. Cool. I'll take that heat. Because even I wouldn't serve vodka to a 1st grader. As terrible of a teenager as I was, I guess I still had some limits.
AI has a few potentially super useful applications like an "assistant" like Apple is making, or customer support/troubleshooting (after being trained on first-party documents), or drafting/replying emails and such. They could certainly be used to collect orders in a drive-thru or elsewhere. But these companies just keep trying to shoehorn them everywhere. We are very much in the midst of an AI "bubble" and it's absolutely astonishing to me how many people seem to be unable to see that.
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