Food Service and AI

Futurism tells us Local Restaurant Exhausted as Google AI Keeps Telling Customers About Daily Specials That Don’t Exist:

Why not query an AI chatbot, a piece of software notorious for inventing facts out of the tokenized ether of the internet, and treat its answer like the word of God?

Ah yeah. People do that.

Don’t.

[…] because you’d annoy the hell out of the restaurant. Just ask the beleaguered owners of the Montana eatery Stefanina’s Wentzville, who are begging their customers to stop using Google’s infamously shambolic AI Overviews to check up on its specials, First Alert 4 reports.

Basically these chatbots are bullshit generators, but they are “sold” as the truth sounding. Peoples at Google (in that case) have been promoted for such a mediocre product release and then the C-suite want to replace the already ruined, but somehow working, search engine by that garbage fire.

Sorry. This angers me.

Now imagine your order being taken by a chatbot you talk to.

BBC reports Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters:

Taco Bell is rethinking its use of artificial intelligence (AI) to power drive-through restaurants in the US after comical videos of the tech making mistakes were viewed millions of times.

In one clip, a customer seemingly crashed the system by ordering 18,000 water cups, while in another a person got increasingly angry as the AI repeatedly asked him to add more drinks to his order.

Mwaaaahh. Who could have predicted that? Virtually anyone not in the C-suite. But the C-suite doesn’t care about customers, all they care about is reducing the workforce.

And McDonald did too, last year: Bacon ice cream and nugget overload sees misfiring McDonald’s AI withdrawn:

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.

I guess they don’t learn from each other, and the tech is still bad. I wonder how many boondongle there is like that?

Previously: Air Canada Chatbot, AI Travel Recommendation.