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.
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I use the app to order then they bring it out to my car. No need to deal with people, fake or not.
Who needs Ronald McDonald when you have managers like them?
The McDonalds managers are nothing like Ronald McDonald. Ronald brings people smiles. Mcdonalds managers bring people sadness.
Pretty sure they all brought people diabetes and cancer
Both are clowns and bring people nightmares.
Apparently they don’t need him because Ronald was fired… Er, “retired,” in 2016.
The final vestige of the clown that I know of was his silhouette being used in the “throw this into a trash can and not on the damn ground” message on the bottom of their paper bags, but even that seems to be gone now.
That‘s what I was getting at actually. They rebranded when clown attacks went viral on the internet. The new image of the company and their now (in)famous jingle „I‘m lovin‘ it!“ was supposed to only launch in Germany for McCafés but promptly went global when they really needed a rebrand quick.
Bubble burst?
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
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.
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 🙄)
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
You don’t need or benefit from an LLM.
You just need voice recognition that works properly.
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
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?”
Should have gone with the real AI solution: Actually Indian
That’s what Tim Hortons did in Canada!
Like, the drive through connects to some Indian call center?
No, they hire a lot of temporary foreign workers from India.
As someone who works with a few Indians, I’m a fan. They’re hard-working and reasonably easy to understand. Can’t be worse than AI, in any case.
Amazon!
Understanding the variety of speech over a drive-thru speaker can be difficult for a human with experience in the job. I can’t see the current level of voice recognition matching it, especially if it’s using LLMs for processing of what it managed to detect. If I’m placing a food order I don’t need a LLM hallucination to try and fill in blanks of what it didn’t convert correctly to tokens or wasn’t trained on.
Especially with vehicle and background noise like assholes blaring music while they’re second in line and maybe turning it down while ordering, or douchebags with loud trucks rolling coal in line
Yeah I’ve seen a lot of dumb LLM implementations, but this one may take the cake. I don’t get why tech leaders see “AI” and go yes, please throw that at everything. I know it’s the current buzzword but it’s been proven OVER AND OVER just in the past couple of months that it’s not anywhere close to ready for prime-time.
Especially in situations like this where it’s quite possible it would cost less to go back to the basics of better pay and training to create willing workers. Maybe the initial cost was less than what they have to spend to improve things, but add in all the backtracking and cost of mistakes, I doubt it.
Most large corporations’ tech leaders don’t actually have any idea how tech works. They are being told that if they don’t have an AI plan their company will be obsoleted by their competitors that do; often by AI “experts” that also don’t have the slightest understanding of how LLMs actually work. And without that understanding companies are rushing to use AI to solve problems that AI can’t solve.
AI is not smart, it’s not magic, it can’t “think”, it can’t “reason” (despite what Open AI marketing claims) it’s just math that measures how well something fits the pattern of the examples it was trained on. Generative AIs like ChatGPT work by simply considering every possible word that could come next and ranking them by which one best matches the pattern.
If the input doesn’t resemble a pattern it was trained on, the best ranked response might be complete nonsense. ChatGPT was trained on enough examples that for anything you ask it there was probably something similar in its training dataset so it seems smarter than it is, but at the end of the day, it’s still just pattern matching.
If a company’s AI strategy is based on the assumption that AI can do what its marketing claims. We’re going to keep seeing these kinds of humorous failures.
AI (for now at least) can’t replace a human in any role that requires any degree of cognitive thinking skills… Of course we might be surprised at how few jobs actually require cognitive thinking skills. Given the current AI hypewagon, apparently CTO is one of those jobs that doesn’t require cognitive thinking skills.
Would this even be necessary for automated ordering anyway? Given that every company under the sun wants you to use some app of theirs these days, including fast food companies, Im kinda surprised they dont just get rid of the speaker/microphone system, and just put a sign with a qr code in front of the drive through telling you to download and use their app to put in a drive through order
Provided they’re fine with cutting off 100% of their business coming from customers older than 50, that’d probably work great. I don’t think they’re quite there yet.
Here in Canada at least they have both at the moment. You can use the drive thru as usual or order through the app and give them a code at the drive thru or just park in a numbered spot and have them bring it out to you without ever talking to someone
I saw a video of someone just trying to pick up in the drive thru after ordering through the app. The location did not have the numbered spots to use. The AI thing wouldn’t let them continue lol. It’s like McDonald’s doesn’t even fully understand their own systems in place.
It’s like those self service kiosks they have. The first version was broken most of the time, but they got the bugs worked out and after that those kiosks were everywhere.
I don’t know which versions I’ve used but I’ve never had a problem with them. The only thing that was confusing is it seemed like it was forcing me to upgrade to a medium combo but they do this in the drive thru too. It may be that they don’t have small combos. I wish fast food services would standardize on size terminology. Where’s ISO and ANSI when I need them for actually useful things.
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.
I got my fried shoes but no ketchup!
Isn’t this just voice recognition software?
Ah yes, give me more companies using AI, trying to replace their employees and then realizing it doesn’t work
How come Walmart gets shit for self checkout but McDonald’s doesn’t get absolutely fucking roasted for Ai
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).
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.
I disagree. Classification in combintion wo ith a confidence score is a viable use case for AI.
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
But the same holds for regression, which you seem to favour. So why do you feel that regression is so much better than classification (which is, when combined with a confidence score, basically regression)?
The problem is that they are just slapping a general use AI onto this and trying to call it a day. Had they created a completely custom model using exclusively recordings of drive-thru interactions it probably would have gone just fine
Unfortunately this is possible.
I think it’s for the better that companies are having these blunders though. It’ll generate some amount of pushback and keep AI from taking over workplaces.
