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McDonald’s Gives Up On ‘AI’ After Comedy Of Errors, Including Putting Bacon On Ice Cream

LLMs certainly hold potential, but as we’ve seen time and time again in tech over the last fifteen years, the hype and greed of unethical pitchmen has gotten way out ahead of the actual locomotive. A lot of people in “tech” are interested in money, not tech. And they’re increasingly making decisions based on how to drum up investment bucks, get press attention and bump stock, not on actually improving anything.

The result has been a ridiculous parade of rushed “AI” implementations that are focused more on cutting corners, undermining labor, or drumming up sexy headlines than improving lives. The resulting hype cycle isn’t just building unrealistic expectations and tarnishing brands, it’s often distracting many tech companies from foundational reality and more practical, meaningful ideas.

bstix ,

Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn't even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

In general, AI really needs to set some boundaries. "No" is a perfectly good answer, but it doesn't ever do that, does it?

chrash0 ,

sure it does. it won’t tell you how to build a bomb or demonstrate explicit biases that have been fine tuned out of it. the problem is McDonald’s isn’t an AI company and probably is just using ChatGPT on the backend, and GPT doesn’t give a shit about bacon ice cream out of the box.

bstix ,

So, what happens if you order a bomb at the McD?

Lost_My_Mind ,

You get bacon on ice cream.

dch82 ,

They really should have used a genetic algorithm to optimise their menu items for maximum customer satisfaction profits instead of using an LLM!

The execs do know other algorithms than LLMs exist right?

EDIT: prob replied to wrong thread

lvxferre ,
@lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

That wouldn't address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

For every funny output like "I asked for 1 ice cream, it's giving me 200 burgers", there's likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like "I asked for 1 ice cream, it's giving 1 burger", that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

It's simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

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.

sunzu ,

Damn... I guess they gonna have to hire shiti organics still to sell that disgusting slop?!

Womp womp

tourist ,
@tourist@lemmy.world avatar

did you really give the robots a slur to use on us

sunzu ,

Planting seed maybe they find me useful once they take over.

We joke but once the real ai comes, it will have everything digital about you in its library.

Pepperridge farm remembers

CarbonatedPastaSauce ,

They’ve been calling us meatbags since at least 2003.

DarkDarkHouse ,
@DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Negative, I am a meat popsicle.

magnetosphere ,
@magnetosphere@fedia.io avatar

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.

conciselyverbose ,

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.

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar
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