- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- funny@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- funny@lemmy.ml
“AI will took ur jerb!”
AI: cant even hack it at Taco Bell or McDonalds
I just got fired at the D… Got something to say? Do that to my face, I dare you 😡😤😭😭
at the D
Calling it “the D” is a bad look
Don’t you be starting judging me now too 😣
I would like a Quarter Pounder Deluxe, large fry, and a medium Coke for the drink.
Is Pepsi okay?
I’d like to speak to the manager.
I’m the manager. Is Pepsi okay?
Kudos to your cashier for making the offer instead of just saying no. They are an asset and shouldn’t be fired.
Also, fuck no. I’ll take a Dr Pepper of Pibb, whichever one you have.
This is the way.
The best I can offer is a 50/50 mixture of Pepsi and barqs root beer.
Your compliments have been heard!The cashier has been replaced with AI. The AI only knows how to serve Pepsi.
Royale with cheese, fries with mayonnaise, and a beer. And no plastic cup either, but a glass of beer.
CLANKERRRR
ai is taking jerbs, despite the fact that it cannot perform them at all, and the cost is being externalized to the customers. its not about whether they can do what they’re meant to do, its about giving corporations excuses to further drive down human wages.
Quality- down
Quantity- down
Profits- UP UP UP
Useful idiots- PROUD PROUD PROUD
I wish we lived in a society where we made fun of idiots for getting ripped off. There’s just so many of them though that it’s seen as normal and we’re the weird ones if we don’t go along with it.
i’d rather go in anyway. order from the app. maybe they can give it to you at drive thru. TB is once a year belly ache
Holy crap, people have been reposting takes on this interview for like three days and you can track the degradation of the actual content via the game of telephone in the headlines.
It’s kinda depressing.
FWIW, having read the original interview everybody is reheating, the 18000 waters was a random example the Taco Bell exec WSJ interviewed used to explain that part of the issue is that people feel less guilty about messing with automated orders than when they’re talking to a human. They are also not backing out from automated orders, which is why the headline is using “rethink”.
The core of the issue is correct, though, the guy does spend a significant amount of time giving corpolese synonims of “it’s a mess”. “We’ve certainly learned a lot” has to be my favourite.
Thanks for posting this take. The topic of AI taking jobs seems to garner a lot of emotional response but not much of a technology discussion.
There were people who were negative about using websites to place orders in the 90s in part because e-commerce killed order processing jobs and the need for phone reps at mail order catalogs.
In this case AI is being used as just another e-commerce UX, so it’s really just a continuation of what’s happening already.
People used to do things like put 18,000, or -1 and all kinds of other garbage in the fields on website order forms as well. That’s just a programmers job to fix with reasonable input validation.
It wouldn’t surprise me if drive-thru like Taco Bell started doing license plate recognition and reputation checking. So if you order and dash more than a couple times they might not take your order from outside in that car anymore.
On the upside they might be able to greet you by name and recall your last order:
Hello Mr Smith… Nice to see you today, would you like 10 cheesy gordita crunch tacos and 1 large diet Pepsi again?
Nice to see you today, would you like 10 cheesy gordita crunch tacos and 1 large diet Pepsi again?
“Would you like some Ozempic or insulin with that?”
That seems overengineered as hell to me. But then, having an entire LLM to do what much older voice recognition software could do better is overengineered by definition. The LLM won’t validate those things because the point of it, if it has one at all in this scenario, is for it to recognize off the cuff speech and malformed orders.
Which is partly why people are finding this idea doesn’t work, I suppose. Have a chatbot improvise based on what people are shouting and you get garbage inputs. Have strict requirements for voice commands and you get lots of failed attempts.
Unlike a bunch of other applications of AI chatbots this one maaaay eventually work. But then again, so may your idea. Honestly, if I was going to overengineer the shit out of having a tortilla-wrapped laxative inside a car I’d have you order directly in your phone and use that license plate recognition idea to prevent you having to talk to anybody or anything in the first place.
Hmm, yes look at the gizmodo article
https://gizmodo.com/taco-bell-says-no-mas-to-ai-drive-thru-experiment-2000649786
Like, this isn’t journalism … it’s ??? “cope-baiting” ? Is that a thing ?
Seriously, this is not a problem with AI, it’s a problem with the developers who don’t know what they’re doing. Whenever building something like this, ALWAYS assume the user will try to break it. Simple.
It’s not software developers, it’s their managers and executives telling them to use AI
Nobody is developing current LLMs. They’re just feeding it garbage from previous versions.
LLMs buit Llm, built on llms. basically its just kiting/fraud with extra steps.
Yeah.
That’s not true. It’s developers incapable of using AI responsibly. If my manager told me to use AI, I would be sure to inform them of the limitations professionally.
At which point most managers would say do it anyway or you’re fired.
If they’re that dumb I wouldn’t want to work for them anyway.
Both are true.
Sure I’ll agree it’s both.
I get annoyed just hearing a pre-recorded greeting at a drive thru. I can’t imagine ordering through an LLM, and yet I imagine I’ll have to deal with it sooner rather than later.
The fucking taco bell AI likes to ask if I would like anything else, then ask if I want nacho fries. Then, hearing “No”, go ahead and add them anyway.
Then it likes watching me drive away, giving the store the finger.
Unfortunate. The worker can just take the order over and correct its mistake.
Or, and hear me out: I can drive off, flip them the bird, and go down to one of the other 15 fast food places within a 5 minute drive, that doesn’t use a speech recognition AI to take my order.
I guess if that makes you happy. Seems like wasted time as opposed to just having the worker take it over and do the order, at which point speech recongition software isn’t being used.
I’ve tried this repeatedly. I’ve answered “No” to their upsale. I’ve sat there in silence, waiting for it to time out. I’ve asked for a human. Every time the AI takes my order, it adds nacho fries that I didn’t order and specifically rejected.
The problem isn’t that I need a human to fix it. The problem is that the AI is specifically programmed to ignore a rejected upsale. Their AI is smart enough to recognize the rest of my complicated order, but it can’t understand “No”? Horseshit. They are using this fraudulent programming to increase their upsale metrics, expecting us to docilely accept the sale rather than raise a fuss.
Drive-offs are another of the metrics they look at. Since I’ve communicated with nobody but the AI, they have nobody but the AI to blame for the drive-off. They don’t get to blame a human for failing to remediate the problem.
Eat their refried beans once and that is all you need, ever. Then the whole AI thing is moot. - just my gut feeling
or the McRib, whatever animal it came from went extinct.
Hmmmmm.
I’ve thought about messing with it before, but now I really want to
can’t believe they saw how shitty mcdonalds became with all their kiosks and automation and thought yeah i want that for me
I rarely go to McDonald’s but I personally like the kiosk because it gives me time to think and change my mind. But the ai I’ll definitely pass on.
Don’t have to deal with it at all if you simply stop going. That’s what I’ve done, as it doesn’t make sense to spend $15 on a fast food meal when the same amount of money buys food from a real restaurant.
I mean there’s no point to it, it doesn’t speed anything up.
For example this morning I had a client meeting (saturdays, ugh) so I went to the train station cause it has a mcdonalds and it opens at 630am. They have 5 kiosks there and one person manning the til. People who were ordering from the til were getting their orders faster than people who used the kiosks. I had to wait 10 minutes just to get a coffee and muffin simply because I used the kiosk.
And it doesn’t even make sense. I would have assumed all the orders go through the same system regardless of where it was placed but apparently not. apparently people who don’t use the kiosk get priority?
McDonalds where I live also still just uses the behind the counter menus (no kiosk menu) so you kind of need to walk over there anyway to be able to make out the actual text of the menu underneath the constantly scrolling advertisements that keep covering it.
They’re trying to create a world where they no longer have to hire people and can get rid of that final cost barrier to infinite money. It’s delusional, but they really think AI is the key to solving that for them.
The point is you don’t pay a wage. It’s not customer experience that matters to McD
It’s the same ordering system, but different queues for drive-through, tills, and kiosk. Usually there’s some priority order, but tills and kiosk shouldn’t be different
let’s get real, when was McDonalds never shitty?
I’ve never liked most of their food, but you used to be able to get a hot, cheap, and quick meal there. And at least the fries were tasty, and the Coca-Cola was perfect.
In the 80s and 90s, going to McDonald’s felt like a guilty pleasure. It felt cheap, but you were in on it so it was ok.
Now it feels cheap at your expense. It’s sparse, like they’re providing the minimal viable product. The fries are garbage, the Coke is garbage, and the service is garbage.
now its shrinkflation, and expensive, while its “cheap” too.
Kiosks are better. I can browse the menu and make up my mind, add and remove items until my order is right. Then from my side the order is always correct, nothing is missing, nobody mishears what I wanted
I’m actually not angry at McDonald’s implementation of their online/kiosk/self serve ordering systems. Not a fan of an AI taking my order tho.
If I’m going through the drive through, just let me talk to a fucking person. They’re standing at the window waiting to collect my payment, doing literally nothing else, just let them take the order too. It’s eliminating work and adding to the global fuckary that is “AI” for absolutely no benefit to anyone.
Unless they’re going to eliminate everyone except the person handing me the food, then fuck off with the AI slop.
10/10 times I would rather order from the app and just pick it up, except their app is shit and won’t allow you to use it until you’ve given them all of your data, signed up for an account, filled out their account recovery questionnaire so they know your mother’s maiden name, your dog’s name from grade school, your blood type, and probably what kinks you like… Just to order a fucking big Mac?
My dudes. You have over estimated your worth to me as a part of society. If the app was just, “hey, where are you?” Then “cool, this store is nearby” selects store “tell me WTF you want” orders “pay me please” Google pay/Apple pay… “Thanks, your order number is asdf1234! Go fucking get it… Also, did you want to create an account to collect rewards or some shit?” Selects no “okay, your shit is waiting for you, go pick it up”
Instead it’s… “Give us access to all your phone data and precise location” Ugh “do you have an account, you need an account” argh furiously types “thanks for signing up, did you know that we have x, y, and z deals for you? We know you like y because you searched for it earlier this week” no “GPS position is not precise enough, cannot locate a store to shop at, please enable hyper precision GPS so we know within a cunthair where exactly you are” … Some time later… “GPs location obtained, you have 8 stores ‘near’ you, most of them are pointless to show you because they’re more than twice the distance from you as the closest store, but we’re going to put those at the top to confuse you instead” picks location “what did you want to buy?” Finally orders “pay me” tries to use Google/Apple pay “something went wrong, we accept Visa, and MasterCard” puts in Visa branded debit information "something went wrong, we accept Visa and MasterCard only " finds actual visa/Mc enreta info “what’s your home address? We ‘need’ it to authorize the credit card transaction” Ugh “is your billing address the same as you home address?” Yes “what’s the expiry, and CVV on the card?” Enters info “thanks! Transaction declined because you put ‘st’ in your address and you should have used ‘Street’. Get fucked” closes app, jumps off bridge
Is it safe to assume the people that made this AI thing for TB got fired and hence AI kind of did make somebody lose their job?
Order kiosks = good Voice to text ordering system = obviously not ready for prime time
A QA tester walks into a
barTaco Bell…“He orders a [Mexi-pizza]. Orders 0 [Mexi-pizzas]. Orders 99999999999 [Mexi-pizzas]. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 [Mexi-pizzas]. Orders a ueicbksjdhd.”
Orders .5 [Mexi-pizzas]. Orders √-1 [Mexi-pizzas]. Orders 1 [Mexi-pizza] with a topping of [Mexi-pizza].

… Ouch
But despite some of the viral glitches facing Taco Bell, it says two million orders have been successfully processed using the voice AI since its introduction.
how much you wanna bet they’re counting the orders where the drive thru worker had to step in and save the floundering algorithm who could not in fact understand basic speech, or even the purpose of a conversation, as orders “successfully processed” using AI
Not to mention when people change their orders from the basics.
“No onions, I’m allergic.”
“Slathering onion juice on everything, got it.”
Ryan started the fire (the office US online order system feels exactly like what you describe)
If money came in the window in exchange for cheap ass beans and tortillas going out the window it’s a win in their books.
I would definitely bet against that because the article states they’re not putting any AI in the drive through going forward.
Do you really think they were smart enough to annotate their chat logs to track failures?
They didn’t even get basic input validation.
Why would they look at chat logs when they can simply ask the chat bot how successful it was?
Two million successful orders!
Heard one guy alone had 18000 orders successfully fullfilled
Can someone who understands this better explain to me how this thing actually places the order into whatever POS they use? Like if LLMs are just advanced auto-complete, I get how they can do “fuzzy” tasks like answering questions or carrying on a conversation, but how do they do rigid tasks like entering the tacos into whatever system the cash register and kitchen use?
Its just an API.
There’s a few ways they could go about it. They could have part of the prompt be something like “when the customer is done taking their order, create a JSON file with the order contents” and set up a dumb register essentially that looks for those files and adds that order like a standard POS would.
They could spell out a tutorial in the prompt, "to order a number 6 meal, type “system.order.meal(6)” calling the same functions that a POS system would, and have that output right to a terminal.
They could have their POS system be open on an internal screen, and have a model that can process images, and have it specify a coordinate pair, to simulate a touch screen, and make it manually enter an order that way as an employee would.
There’s lots of ways to hook up the AI, and it’s not actually that different from hooking up a normal POS system in the first place, although just because one method does allow an AI to interact doesn’t mean it’ll go about it correctly.
LLMs, with a little coaxing, perform well at returning well formed JSON.
They do, my concern is more about if that JSON is correct, not just well-formed.
Also, 18000 waters might be correct JSON, but makes an AI a bad cashier.
There is a lot more that goes into it than just being correct. 18000 waters may have been the actual order, because somebody decided to screw with the machine. A human who isn’t terminally autistic would reliably interpret that as a joke and would simply refuse to punch that in. The LLM will likely do what a human tells it to do, since it has no contextual awareness, it only has the system prompt and whatever interaction with the user it had so far.
Thats part of correctness to me, delivering an order that taco bell actually would make is important.
Semantics aside, though, we agree. That’s very important.
So they just trim the instructions so it doesn’t take joke orders, so it can make more reasonable decisions, like:
“May I take your order?”
“Two double whoppers with extra mayo and a chocolate cherry banana sundae”
“Oh you’ve GOTTA be joking!”
It’s trivial to get LLMs to act against the instructions
The LLM isn’t limited to just what it does. It can interact with other programs.
There are a ton of audio recognition systems available, almost all of them predate this LLM bubble. There’s already an API for interacting with the ordering system. So it’s just down to having the LLM pull what is then do that corresponding action for the order.
This is so simple it doesn’t require anything nearly as complicated as an LLM. The old phone assistants like Siri and Alexa could do this type of thing. It’s literally the same as telling Alexa to place an order for something, and that’s been an ability for years.
So the output from the LLM is just a text description that’s fed into another, smarter piece of software that interprets that text into an order? What task is the LLM actually doing in this case?
The LLM is taking the order. Interpreting what people say into that simple text description. Not everyone talks the same or describes things the same. That is i believe where the bulk of the LLM is doing the work. Then I’m sure there is some background stock management and health checks out manages as well
The LLM is taking the order
What’s wrong with an input machine with buttons or touch screen?
Not futuristic enough or something.
Takes too long to hold down the button for 18,000 waters.
They are not able to answer questions or change simply via a software update.
OT4G
(Order Time For Grandma)
not as hype-able to the csuites and ceos.
We have apps for that, and they’re typically a pita. They certainly take longer than just talking through your order.
Yeah, unlike a human that understands a customer saying “one pizzaburger, that’s all”, the app doesn’t understand the situation that the order is complete, but rather just keeps on asking more obviously unwanted cringey questions like “buy two, you’ll save a few cents on the second one?” or “what will you drink with that?” or “is that a big menu?”…
I don’t think there is an LLM in this application. Not all AI tools involve LLM.
I think the role of the LLM is just to make the system understand the order more accurately.
Probably something like this. Except not trained to be a rebellious troll. Part of her training set is his chat, hehe. Though despite this one being “evil” neuro, I think normal neurosama is more of a troll now, lol.
This is clipped segments from a live stream, so it jumps ahead at times. It has links to the source channel if you would prefer a full video. This one is probably already too long for most people though.
He does end up figuring out why she has so much trouble correctly inserting code in the right places later.
Edit: also, everytime she says “filtered”, it means whatever she was gonna say would have broken youtube or twitch rules. He has two filters, one on the text generated and one on the text to speech. If the text one catches it, it just outputs filtered instead, if the speech one catches it, she’ll still type something terrible, but only say roughly the first syllable or 2 before the speech is cut off.
It sounds actually very funny to try and break it
I saw a short of the guy doing that, the AI voice started to respond and then it cut off and a human said “What can I get for you?”
Some companies make AI interviews, prompt breaking it to pass the interview xD
I tried that with an LLM and it told me I was clever and smart.
there’s that regurgitation and feedback loop.






















