McDonalds removes AI drive-throughs after order errors ( www.bbc.com )

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.

someacnt_ ,

Bubble burst?

werefreeatlast ,

I got my fried shoes but no ketchup!

AllYourSmurf , (edited )

and a large orange drink

Regrettable_incident ,
@Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world avatar

Isn't this just voice recognition software?

Landsharkgun ,

Hey, McDonalds, I got a general AI that can understand human speech.

It's located between my neck and the top of my head, and it costs $25/hr for fuel consumption.

randon31415 ,

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?"

darth_tiktaalik ,
@darth_tiktaalik@lemmy.ml avatar

Turns out customers weren't ordering the McDeadly neurotoxin

gentooer ,

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.

Linus_Torvalds ,

I disagree. Classification in combintion wo
ith a confidence score is a viable use case for AI.

vrighter ,

you know that the confidence value is generated by the ai itself right? So it could still spew out bullshit with high confidence. The confidence score doesn't really help much

JJROKCZ ,

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

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

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

afraid_of_zombies ,

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

KingThrillgore , (edited )
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

...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.

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Why would they not be able to afford someone...? And run out of "options"...?

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Not if the car is stopped. Here's how it should work:

  1. park in a "drive-thru" stall
  2. scan QR code specific to that stall (optional - connect to wifi at the stall)
  3. enter order through a simple webapp
  4. 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.

afraid_of_zombies ,

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

sugar_in_your_tea ,

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.

shotgun_crab ,

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

SendMePhotos ,

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

sugar_in_your_tea ,

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).

Lucidlethargy , (edited )
@Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works avatar

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.

BananaTrifleViolin ,

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.

afraid_of_zombies ,

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.

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe different people are saying those different things.

afraid_of_zombies ,

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 ,

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

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

afraid_of_zombies ,

No. Everything is not an opinion. There is the real universe.

conciselyverbose ,

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.)

afraid_of_zombies ,

There is no objective truth.

Hmm is this a true statement no matter what people think of it?

conciselyverbose ,

It has not happened yet. By definition there is no "reality".

There are merely informed opinions, uninformed opinions, and fraudulent opinions.

afraid_of_zombies ,

Hmm is this a true statement no matter what people think of it?

conciselyverbose ,

It's a true statement for any future event.

It doesn't soften the fact that opinions can be stupid and uninformed.

afraid_of_zombies ,

I see. So you say that any prediction about the future is subjective, except of course this prediction that you are making now? Every rule has en exception, except this rule, but if it doesn't it does and if it does than it doesnt.

Not to date you too badly but 2500 years ago is when we figured out that everythinf is subjective leads to contradictions.

conciselyverbose ,

No, that's not even sort of what I said. The fact that there is no inherent source of truth to compare to does not give license to idiotic takes. It doesn't invalidate people pointing out that an opinion is idiotic. It's simply an acknowledgement that multiple intelligent opinions are possible.

There's inherent uncertainty to everything, down to such an extreme level that predicting individual particles' behavior has to be probabilistic. The existence of that uncertainty doesn't prevent some statements from being stupid and wrong.

afraid_of_zombies ,

So you are saying I was wrong before?

ours ,

Self-driving cars are AI. And they are butting against the Pareto Principle.

qevlarr ,
@qevlarr@lemmy.world avatar

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

BananaTrifleViolin ,

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.

qevlarr ,
@qevlarr@lemmy.world avatar

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

Passerby6497 ,

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 🙄)

LordKitsuna ,

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

conciselyverbose ,

You don't need or benefit from an LLM.

You just need voice recognition that works properly.

DrCake ,

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

OriginalUsername7 ,

A computer: does anything.

Tech journalists: is this AI?

daddy32 ,

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.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

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.

exu ,
@exu@feditown.com avatar

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

lando55 ,

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

LordArtoria ,

Tim Minchin reference?

brianorca ,

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.

sugar_in_your_tea , (edited )

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.

brianorca , (edited )

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.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

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.

the_doktor ,

"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.

thorbot ,

Show us on this doll where the AI touched you

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