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McDonalds removes AI drive-throughs after order errors (www.bbc.com)

submitted 4 months ago by Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] gentooer@programming.dev 19 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] LordKitsuna@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] VinnyDaCat@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] Linus_Torvalds@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I disagree. Classification in combintion wo ith a confidence score is a viable use case for AI.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Linus_Torvalds@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

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)?