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.

McDonald's told franchisees it would remove the tech from the more than 100 restaurants it has been testing it in by the end of July, as first reported by trade publication Restaurant Business.

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[–] 88 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

translation: we tried to replace the functions of yet more of our employees and can not yet, effectively, automate more of them out of a job. But we're working on it.

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  • [–] 58 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    You mean the thing that misinterpreted orders from a small list of choices would potentially identify and bomb an all girls children's school if used by the military?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    I don't believe it was ai's fault at all. I believe they hit that girls school on purpose to kill the kids of a bunch of their leaders and elites.

    That sort of thing is right up Israel's alley, killing the families of people they don't like. Our president endorsed the same thing at one point campaigning too.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    Just 2 more years!

    /s for those of dilatory cognitive ability

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  • [–] 20 points 1 month ago

    Handily demonstrating, again, that frontline customer service is skilled labour.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    It's hard enough to get a human to understand your order through those crappy microphones.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    Remember when they tried outsourcing that to India?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    No, but it doesn't surprise me.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

    Do you remember why this failed?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    The same reason cold calling doesn't work anymore.

    The amount of insurance company calls I get since I have to renew my car insure is absurd. They can go fuck themselves and I will never give them a dime.

    "John" with a thick Indian accent on the phone isn't someone I would trust honestly. It's not a racism thing, it's the I don't want to give any information about myself to someone in another country especially when they specialize in scamming people.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 month ago* (6 children)

    “Because it’s 2024. 2026 models are way better!”

    “What do you mean each order costs $3 in tokens? We pay those employees $6 per hour!”

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    If only they could cool data centers with coca cola /s

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    That's what they are using the ice cream machine for.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    How? It's broken.

    LOL I know for a fact when the "ice cream machine doesn't work" it either ran out of 'milk'... cuz refilling requires pouring a 2 gal bag of sugary milk into the top end the chances of spilling and making a massive mess are pretty high.

    Or they didn't do cleaning cycle and it's won't turn on until they do.

    Go to Diary Queef if you want ice cream.

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  • Datacenters is why their coffee is so hot.

    ...

    Actually it is interesting why scalding coffee is better for the fast food business

    Slows cooling: High heat buys time for commuters.

    Masks bitterness: Extreme heat numbs taste buds temporarily.

    Hides cheap beans: Lower-grade coffee tastes better when hot.

    Prevents complaints: Customers rarely complain about coffee being too hot.

    Reduces returns: Cold coffee gets sent back.

    Reduces refills: Customers cannot chug boiling liquids.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    My friend who works at McDs says people at the drive thru dont believe he's a human no matter how much he tries to reassure them.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    I hope it cost them a lot of money to implement and then to remove it. As long as it ate into their profits I don't care

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Can't do a minimum wage job yet they expect it to take over $90k+ salary jobs

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    This one has a clear economic issue as well: AI synthesized speech burns a shitton of money but somehow replaces minimum wage work. No idea how they imagined it would work. And tokens only getting more expensive since they're currently heavily subsidized

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  • [–] [S] 13 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    What annoys me is that automating order taking doesn't require a full LLM. They could easily program a voice to text system with a library of food items, basic voice commands, and have the outputs display on the screen so that the user can verify and correct the order verbally.

    Like smart tech doesn't need to know anything beyond it's job. But they're trying to normalize these massively superflous systems because the economics of big corporations has completely decoupled from reality. && Fascism.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I recall pretty reliable hotlines with just that, and when their schematic script was failing you, they refered you to a human operator. But it doesn't have an AI buzz around it, and on paper it isn't as simple and universal as a chatbot that can verbally answer any question by spending tokens on 3rd party's servers. I can see why this idea sells and why technical, ethical, economical and usability issues get overlooked by linkedin managers, but it doesn't make it less frustrating.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    Naw, audio doesn't take much, definitely not as much as a full time employee. The text models probably don't need to be very large for this, the whole thing can probably run on a modern phone.

    With all the optimization that has been done, everything can be done pretty efficiently except for video and good image gen.

    The main issue with all this is probably audio quality (wind + car running + garbage microphones)

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  • [–] -3 points 1 month ago

    Inference is actually relatively cheap. A company the size of McDonald's could also negotiate a deal.

    Tokens are expensive for you but for the labs tokens are cheap, training is expensive.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Nah, bro. AGI is just around the corner, fr fr. Hear me out, bro, it's gonna be so lit for everyone! Come on, bro! Fucking utopia!

    /s as if I really need it

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Even if AGI was "just around the corner", it'll be built on the bones of the broken-ass LLM situation we have now. The optimism doesn't just cover our ability to iterate towards it, it extends to the ability of said AGI's ability to unlearn bluffing, gaslighting, and just fabricating things. I'm super doubtful about all of it, especially the latter part.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    Oh come on that is simply beneath the power of the Altman! His machines just completely solved a 90 year old math problem!

    It’s so solved no mathematician has been able to verify it or peer review it, but who needs them?

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago

    The more I sit on it, the more enraged I am about the news.

    They most likely stole the result. They dropped a massive proof with no human understanding it (come on, how many can understand math at that level? 5 world wide? And definitely none at OpenAI), they dropped hundreds of thousands of line of validation (see above), burned a significant fraction of the metaphorical Amazon in the process, dumped more money than most math departments yearly budgets, and claimed victory.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Altman could be taking billions by offering a CEO, CFO, CIO, CTO and management AI.

    It's a crazy idea, I know. But in the office of office of redundant redundancy redundancy, management tends to be too thick and ineffective and inefficient. If we could just replace those hard to do things with AI, the management team might be free to learn other things and do other things.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    I have very limited experience in LARGE corporations. But it seems to me those are all "putting out fires" positions requiring some level of rapport with key individuals and usually privileged knowledge.

    Not saying it justifies the exorbitant salaries they get. Just explaining why in a "shareholder profits first" system we're not seeing AI's running corporations.

    Especially given the results of AI run vending machines / stores.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    I've often said this, the CEO's compensation is because he's to take blame if shit goes sideways and they need the stock price to stop falling. Though in recent times they don't get fired nearly as easily

    And most of the comp tends to be in stock to motivate them to make whatever decisions raise the share price the most, including things that a normal person would find unethical. If you're paid a flat salary, you don't really care

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  • We don't see AI's taking executive positions because the executives are the ones making the decisions. US executives are inefficient compared to their compensation, for example, in Japan they make far less and yet some of the most successful companies in the world are controlled by Japanese management, but they are the ones who decide their own salaries.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 month ago (9 children)

    I stopped going to fast food restaurants when they added these dumb AI bots. It barely could function when you wanted to do a simple modification to an order and it basically couldn't answer any questions about the menu you may have. Seemed like seasonal items or promotions were outside of its training data as well.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago* (3 children)

    I stopped when they started charging sit down restaurant prices for food barely higher quality than what prisoners eat.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    and when the menu started rotating so that you would awkwardly stand there waiting for the 10-second window to check out a set of items and then have to wait for it to come back around

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    This seriously makes me crazy, whoever thought/thinks this makes any sense whatsoever as a menu design is out of their skulls. Please, PLEASE just a simple list of menu items with prices, these flashy changing menus offer nothing but frustration and slow things down.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    +1, I also stopped shopping from any market that forces self-checkouts. I waste more time, I scan my own stuff, and for what exactly? So the company can earn more money by kicking out their employees? Why the fuck don't we even get a discount for "working briefly" in their market? Nothing these companies pull off ever benefits the society.

    Offering the option is one thing, forcing it down your throat is another.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    You know I've had this argument with people so often but yet they're so ignorantly adamant that they are so much more efficient at scanning and packing their own groceries and plus they don't want to talk to anybody. It makes me rage. I really hate the direction that society has taken when it comes to communicating to other human beings. Like we live in a society where we're supposed to be social with each other.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I bet some amount of that was deliberate. Kinda like how they started charging extra for value items "dressed like a mac" when people realized the only real difference between a McDouble dressed like a mac was the central bun and it was much cheaper. So they started charging most of that price difference for a squirt of sauce that replaced a squirt of ketchup because McDoubles were for people too poor to afford a Big Mac, not for people who could afford a Big Mac but thought it was a rip off. At least that's what I remember from the time before I realized McDonald's wasn't ever worth going to. I can't think of a single fast food place with burger patties as pathetic as McDonald's (though I have a feeling the US has other chains competing for that spot).

    When you're dealing with a human, they can make customizations that might upset the greedy little piggies at the top that would rather gouge people for any improvements and hate when employees give out freebies even if they cost nothing and generate good will for the business. Hell that might have been the difference between then and now for my willingness to go there at all, as it felt less human and more corporate hellish when they started charging for it.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    I can't think of a single fast food place with burger patties as pathetic as McDonald's

    It doesn't even smell like food. To my shame, I occasionally crave a double quarter-pounder, as awful as I know they are. I usually eat it in the car, but last time, I took it home and left it on the table while I went to the loo, and the smell filling my flat when I came back was not appetising in the least.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Our children aren't a concern of their's. Saving money and resources is. What do you think is going to happen to education quality if they get what they want and AI takes over mental tasks throughout the economy and bureaucracies across society? What actual value with mass education have at that point?

    They won't see the value in educating anyone at all and they'll push for the cheapest option, filled primarily with lessons on how important it is to do what you're told.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Just proves that serving at mcD takes higher levels of cognition than writing code.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    Surprised simple speech recognition haven't been done. Then you confirm your order

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 1 month ago* (7 children)

    I mean, ultimately it would be slower than just having a person. Serving less customers per hour is part of it, but also people may go elsewhere if they see a lineup.

    Just speaking as someone who worked drive thru at mcdicks for a year. Not saying I endorse it.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    At this point I'm surprised they have not just replaced the speaker with the screens like they have inside. Maybe they have I've not been through a drive through in a long time.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 month ago

    I doubt they will before full automated kiosks become a thing. Even then I could actually see them keeping a human order taker / maintenance person there and having the food made by robots.

    But the main issue is that customers would take too long without someone prompting them. When I worked drive thru I said a lot of "hurry along" things. Like when people named a sandwich I'd interject "Combo?" and "Coke with that?" as well as "Is that everything". Even please drive ahead.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    I don't see this working because of car height and arm length differences. I hate the drive thru at banks since I usually have to open the door and half get out of the car if I forget to slide in as close as I can to the thing.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Wouldn't need to be if the speech recognition was good. Then the workers are free to do something else. Theoretically of course

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    So when I worked drive thru I said a lot of "hurry along" things. Like when people named a sandwich I'd interject "Combo?" and "Coke with that?" as well as "Is that everything". Even please drive ahead.

    So like it's not the voice to text that's the only potential source of delay.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    They shoulda tested it in the corporate offices instead of on the front line. Everyone knows the front line work is way harder and way more stressful than preparing and filing the TPS reports.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Look at that. A little bit of positive news to start the day. I know that other companies have tried to implement AI into drive thrus as well and hopefully they follow McDonald's here. AI has real uses but every company seems determined to use it in the worst way possible.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    You also can't get the correct orders from humans.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    It's not satisfying at all to yell at a chatbot. They'd rather yell at an authentic minimum wage worker.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Precisely. Take that clunkers.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Great. Now how long until they try again? It's so crazy how much they want it to work despite all the evidence proving that its going to be a bad idea and in the end cost more than the people you hired at the lowest cost possible. For a company that loves power its crazy to think they are just ok handing over a decent chunk of that power to another company that will dictate how much it costs and unlike employees that get no raises or maybe a dime, these AI contracts will absolutely have clauses were every year they will rise 5%. It's not a hard decision here yet for some reason they really won't drop it. If that wasn't enough nobody likes talking to a bot! Your hurting your company every step of the way...

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    For a company that loves power its crazy to think they are just ok handing over a decent chunk of that power to another company

    While at the same time fighting unions every step of the way.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Let's be clear here. If politicians aren't competent enough to make burgers or serve orders, they're not competent enough to run countries.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    McD outside USA: we have good, simple burger and you can order using app or kiosk McD in USA: wow, ibm treats us nice, let's make the franchisees give them some monies

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Bacon topped ice cream sounds good

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago*

    Wanted a technical tweaking guide based on other hardware specifics, which had an anti-AI license on it, basically every model:

    "Reworking this specific text through an AI service is exactly what that license carves out, so I can't use this document as the basis for the new guide. What I can do is write you a fresh, original guide"

    Some high level dribbling and bullshittery lol... have fun as an enterprise burning down ur business cause that trillion dollar clanker doesn't care lol

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (10 children)

    If you cannot get the right burger from an Al customer service bot, it is not an appropriate tool for education, tutoring, or any other high-stakes task.

    It's not an appropriate tool for those things, no. But this is a fallacious statement. These companies are not utilizing good AI models in their drive through software, they're using the cheapest, most bare-minimum models they can possibly get their hands on. But even if they use good models and do solve AI food ordering, even if they do manage to make it as good as a human for the task, it will still not be an appropriate tool for education or tutoring.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    They don't want to replace teachers.

    They want to replace mandatory reporters.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    It's not a fallacious statement. You're correct that it would still not be an appropriate tool, but that statement doesn't claim it would be.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    It suggests that it would. It is suggesting that the quality of the models' ability to correctly understand a fast food order indicates its fitness to be used in teaching, but I would say that even a model which can flawlessly take a cheeseburger order—even a model which can flawlessly mimic the action of teaching—wouldn't be appropriate for the task. The quality of its output is unrelated to its fitness to the purpose.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    That last sentence is interesting to me. Care to expand further?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Not Op, but fitness for the purpose of education is as follows: being human.

    A non-human cannot teach to be a human to others, just like a non-cheetah cannot teach s cheetah how to be a cheetah. It applies to every social animal...

    Emotions, hormones, dealing with our body's health, that's all stuff that ai model will never be able to understand and teach correctly.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    (I'm not OP)

    If we accept that facts are justified true beliefs (as per epistemology), then someone needs to have a belief (a proposition) which corresponds to reality and a justification to link the two (otherwise it is merely a correct guess). Looking at it like this we can see why AI is unfit for the purpose of teaching, which needs to be factual.

    I assume he could also mean the fundamental problem of induction. For the purpose of teaching, it is required to be truth-apt, but AI can at best be truth-like. Just as it can't tell apart instructions from data it can't tell apart facts from fabrication due to its stochastic nature.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    The other two answers are excellent: only a human can teach anyone how to be a human, and AIs are structurally incapable of understanding any concept sufficiently to teach it.

    I might further add: the current structure of AI as a wholly for-profit enterprise adds a level of cynicism and a susceptibility to corruption that even a for-profit human educator is not subject to; that is to say, do we want any corporation (really, any single entity) to be responsible, not only for the structure of education, but for its entire expression?

    Even if a hypothetical perfect AI were completely benevolent, and owned by the people, it would still represent a bottleneck of thought and idea that would heterogenize our society. But we don't live in that world, so it's almost a certainty that education would be for sale to the highest bidder. You think historical revisionism is bad now? What if BMW could pay OpenAI to downplay the role of Germany in World War II?

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago

    Isn't that a rejection of the premise you set up though? If you are describing a flaw in that an AI isn't capable of teaching a human, then 1) it isn't flawless, and 2) it's circular in that an AI isn't capable because it isn't capable. Would you apply the same the same logic to something like a philosophical zombie?

    Not engaging with the other 2 paragraphs because they are irrelevant to the original comment.

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