Taco Bell's AI Drive-Thru Plan Gets Caught Up On Trolls and Glitches
- Reference: 0178922530
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/08/29/0037244/taco-bells-ai-drive-thru-plan-gets-caught-up-on-trolls-and-glitches
- Source link:
> Since [4]announcing plans to put AI in the drive-thru last year, Taco Bell has deployed the tech in over 500 locations across the US, according to the WSJ. Other fast-food chains are experimenting with AI, too, including McDonald's, Wendy's, and White Castle. Mathews tells the outlet that while the company still plans on pushing ahead with AI voice technology and evaluating the data, he's discovered that using AI exclusively in certain situations, like a drive-thru for "super busy restaurants with long lines," might not be such a great idea after all.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/767421/taco-bell-ai-drive-thru-trolls-glitches
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/perfectlycutscreams/comments/1hpclnx/18000_water_cups/
[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/taco-bell-rethinks-future-of-voice-ai-at-the-drive-through-72990b5a?mod=rss_Technology
[4] https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/07/31/2225254/taco-bell-is-bringing-ai-to-hundreds-of-drive-thrus-nationwide
I mean ... (Score:2)
... what would you normally do if someone orders 18000 water cups? Unless it's a robot filling the cups too, I think you're gonna be fine.
Re:I mean ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Their stocking system might try to reorder their entire complement of cups. An automated QA system might ding somebody for not filling the order. Use your imagination -- there are lots of ways this could go wrong as they increase automation.
Re: (Score:2)
You are thinking they have a system that "does everything". If the AI system is there primarily to handle the order process, then anything like this wouldn't do more than just take the orders in whatever language the customer speaks, and for the food prep, it's being done by people who don't necessarily speak the same language.
Re: (Score:2)
But presumably this AI system is creating order tickets and those do ultimately feed into supply chain stuff. I don't work in a taco field, but i've seen all kinds of weird knock on effects from people fat-fingering numbers on factory systems. I'm sure there's a process to go back and edit the order ticket to remove that number, but you have to ask yourself if a taco bell employee cares enough. They'll probably neither fill 1800 water cups nor edit the ticket - they'll just hand out one and laugh about it
Re: (Score:3)
It sure as hell looks stupid coming through the computer, especially if the poor taco flipper filling the order has to manually refuse every cup
Re: (Score:2)
They just have to hit the minus key on the order cart 17,999 times. Or delete the entire row and re-add. Oh but because of an overflow condition, they might actually have to hit the + key.
Re: (Score:1)
This seems like a tempest in a teapot. All this system does in any anomalous condition is dump the customer over to the drive-through employee to take the order manually like before.
It shouldn't be difficult to define escape conditions for this. If quantity is over X (for ANY item), or if it's been more than 30 seconds and no item has been added to the order, etc.
A system like this doesn't have to work 100% of the time, just 95% of the time to take some load off employees to (supposedly) allow orders to be
Re: (Score:2)
You mean as long as you define "95%" of the anomalous conditions ahead of time. Should take someone like you, what, about an afternoon with break for tea?
Re: (Score:2)
The issue with your logic is that 5 percent of the customers get an awful customer experience. Sure Taco Bell saves some money on staffing but 5% of frustrated customers might not come back.
Re: (Score:2)
Not at all. This is no different than those times an employee cannot hear or understand a person and asks them to pull up to the window. Is that also an "awful customer experience"? Because I can tell you right now, humans are not right 100% of the time taking drive-thru orders.
Further, you're not even considering the responsiveness. AI begins taking the order immediately, where employees often have a several second delay before they can get to you, and that's assuming they don't flat-out tell you to wait
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't a big deal. The rolled it out in New Orleans. I just say "human please" and it immediately dumps me to the human ready to take my name from my app order.
Re: (Score:2)
> ... what would you normally do if someone orders 18000 water cups? Unless it's a robot filling the cups too, I think you're gonna be fine.
Unless the store manager happens to also be a Tik Tok influencer who wants to turn filling 18000 water cups into some kind of "viral" stunt.
8 hours and a $2,000 water bill later, they'll realize the 27,000 views wasn't nearly enough to stop off a well-justified firing.
Unless the district manager happens to also be a..
(Try not to forgot the attention-whoring world we live in.)
Re: (Score:2)
> 8 hours and a $2,000 water bill later
Damn, do you live in the middle of the Sahara Desert or something? If the cups are 16 oz each, 18,000 cups would be 2250 gallons. I think that would cost me something like $60.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd be curious if there is some asymmetry in their systems because of the enthusiasm of retail type outfits for trying to keep potential damage from basically untrusted employees to a minimum.
You see it a lot in grocery stores, and big box/department store setups where there are either certain POS operations that lock up and require manager approval(seems most common if they need to void a mis-scan over a certain value or multiple mis-scans or customer-decides-they-don't-want-it changes of order; or if s
Training and craftsmanship (Score:2)
The LLM probaly has no data on that. [1]There is a great article about how LLMs are most trained in "right" actions, but not in correcting wrong ones. [understandingai.org]. So these LLMs do not develop craftsmanship. Remember, real craftsmanship is not about doing everything right, but about understanding and experience that allow you to fix mistakes.
[1] https://www.understandingai.org/p/reinforcement-learning-explained
Re: (Score:2)
> ... what would you normally do if someone orders 18000 water cups? Unless it's a robot filling the cups too, I think you're gonna be fine.
In that case, the system responded properly by passing the customer to a human; which was the whole point of the video.
Re: (Score:1)
Malicious compliance.
18,000 cups went to the customer.
Re: (Score:2)
Which Taco Bell stocks 18,000 cups?
Bojangles (Score:5, Interesting)
Bojangles (primarily a southern chain in VA, NC, SC and GA) have been using AI at the drive throughs and it works great. I don't know how immune it is to trolling, because I'm not an ass, but it works great for normal people.
Re: (Score:2)
Trolling by nature is the realm of people who are being an ass. If AI makes the process of ordering food easier and less of a problem, then it should be seen as a good thing. I don't speak Spanish, so if I am trying to order food and the person taking orders inside or on the drive through doesn't have an acceptable mastery of the English language and primarily speaks only English, that's a problem. A business that uses AI to eliminate this language barrier isn't pathetic, and if the system works decen
Re: (Score:1)
> A business that uses AI to eliminate this language barrier
They aren't using it to eliminate the language barrier, or even trying to. They only claim they're trying to as a marketing afterthought.
They're using it to eliminate employees . That is the only criteria.
And to go into the details: Employees are either the #1 or #2 expense for them, probably #1, given the margins on raw materials in that industry. That means that the AI can actually degrade the quality of service and cost them a lot of lost business and still be more profitable than the employees. If your e
Re: (Score:2)
> They're using it to eliminate employees.
There's not a single restaurant in the world where a fast food employee taking your order at a drive through isn't also working on a second task in parallel. This isn't eliminating any employees. If anything it's likely to free up an employee to focus on the other thing they are doing and reduce the number of times your order gets fucked up due to multitasking.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course it is. Just because the employee currently is doing some additional stuff, it does not mean that the employee is not left go, and the other employees asked to take up the slack.
Re: (Score:3)
It honestly wouldn't surprise me if their "AI" was a mechanical turk.
Re: (Score:2)
It probably wouldn't surprise the MBAs either, but they don't care as long as it's cheaper than employees.
Nice (Score:2)
donald_glover_good.gif
Not AI's fault, just crappy developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't train the AI model to have sane limits for free items, didn't write business logic to limit what the AI model could send to the ordering system. No different than that team that recently posted about losing its whole production database when their AI agent panicked during a deployment and dropped the production database. Not the fault of AI. Just the fault of unprofessional people who mistake a barely working proof of concept that is only ready for internal stakeholder demos for something ready to be unleashed on the public.
(WRT the database story, this is... why you use something like Liquibase, Flyway, Rails transitions, etc. not some dumbass crap like "Claude, uses these credentials to go automagically update my database based on the entity objects in my code base.")
Re: (Score:2)
Would be more sane to just not have free items.
Even one penny is better than free.
Re: (Score:1)
> Would be more sane to just not have free items.
False. Those items' costs are priced into the products, and having to account for them just means more opportunities for errors which increases costs and makes the business less competitive (if you increase prices to compensate) or less profitable. The human workers have been told how to limit those items and the software should also be told how to limit those items. If the software can't do that reliably, then it's the problem.
Re:Not AI's fault, just crappy developers (Score:5, Insightful)
> The human workers have been told how to limit those items and the software should also be told how to limit those items.
I suspect that, by and large, they have not, in fact, been told how to limit those items, because they don't need to be told. If a request (like 100 cups) seems unreasonable, they'll either call a manager, or just say no and get screamed at until they call a manager. But they don't need any actual training on what is unreasonable.
AIs cannot be taught common sense. Every AI in existence so far has proven it, again and again.
Re: (Score:2)
To have common sense, you have to have a) senses and b) be a commoner. Both are not part of being an AI.
Re: (Score:2)
You really believe people are going to go to a drive thru that charges them per napkin, per straw, per bag? Not that the MBAs wouldn't love to if they could.
Re: (Score:2)
It's Taco Bell.
If people are willing to eat that shit, they probably don't care about being charged for napkins.
just make it go into beavis and butthead mode when (Score:3)
just make it go into beavis and butthead mode when people start fucking with it.
Re: (Score:3)
I think it was a funny comment, and that you are being an AC jerk.
Idiot proofing (Score:4, Insightful)
Idiot proofing is hard, because we have so many, and they're kind of clever. Every time you shut off one avenue, they create a new foot path.
Where is the buyer going to put all of that water? (Score:2)
Talk about shooting oneself in the foot. With employing fewer teenagers being the goal, and hence the teenagers interacting with the public less , where are they going to get their future competent managers from? You know, the managers who have to deal with the public's problems/complaints? Or are they going to hire pricey, off-the-street, middle-management types who know nothing about that business?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, if we replace all entry-level jobs with AI, there's going to be a problem a few years later.
I want to talk to a person! (Score:3)
Going inside my local Taco Bell, you're presented with touchscreen kiosks and exactly zero cashiers. I don't want to stand there doing a cashier's job, I want to tell a cashier my order and pay them. It's faster and easier for the customer (in my experience at least) to go through a living cashier.
Oh, and stop skimping on the cheese you cheap jerks!
Re: (Score:2)
Every Taco Bell I've been in recently will, in fact, have a person take your order. If you're patient enough for them to notice you. Fastest way seems to be to stand at the kiosk on the counter and act confused and irritated. But overall, I do agree.
(McDonald's, on the hand, has apparently listened to the feedback on the many ways their kiosks suck, and they're actually not too bad now. You have all the same options as the cashier for each item, and it is actually faster about 99% of the time because there
Re: (Score:2)
Fake news, didnt know you talk to a real person scrolling mindlessly on Amazon's site and checking out.
Re: (Score:2)
When asked to use the Kiosk, I clearly state out loud "The recent study I read shows that nearly 100% of restaurant screens contain fecal matter. I'm not touching that!" and everyone in the place freezes up for a moment. One place even handed me a pair of rubber gloves to place the order.
Seriously, just take my order. Sheesh.
Re: (Score:2)
> I don't want to stand there doing a cashier's job
I wonder, do you apply that logic everywhere and completely refuse to do any online transactions? You're not doing a cashier's job, the cashier's job by nature is a redundant extra step, one that may introduce error into the process causing your order to get fucked up.
But that said I do support shops having one cashier for you and others like you. We need options, and the options should be diverse because you and I have different desires. I don't want to stand in line because it's not financially viable to
Re: (Score:2)
> Going inside my local Taco Bell, you're presented with touchscreen kiosks and exactly zero cashiers. I don't want to stand there doing a cashier's job, I want to tell a cashier my order and pay them. It's faster and easier for the customer (in my experience at least) to go through a living cashier.
> Oh, and stop skimping on the cheese you cheap jerks!
I like the kiosks, at least at McDonalds. Because I can just walk up, select what I want and add the customization I want to the order then pay by card right the
The right outcome is....? (Score:2)
Surely that should trigger the firing of the chief digital and technology officer?
He's Saving Face for his Superior (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience with this, and no I have 0 knowledge of the situation, but that never stopped anyone in the internet before-- he's calling it an "oh shucks" situation to save the face of the superior that pushed hard on this (and that he yes-man'd into reality).
"Who could've known" prevents ego bruising the little tyrant who is flawless above you and thus gets your head off the chopping block to pay for their mistakes.
Or not.
Courage (Score:2)
It takes Apple level courage to fuck up ordering at your large restaurant chain. Dane Mathews is a risk taker, but apparently not very good at judging risk.
This Has Become Absolutely Stupid (Score:1)
"AI" does not need to be used as often as possible. This is having seriously diminishing returns, at this point. There are kiosks and mobiles apps handling an ever growing portion of orders. For drive-thru, they could literally consolidate order taking in a call center (many have, perhaps even Taco Bell). Investing in "AI" handling it isn't going to yield returns at that point... especially as the actual costs for running these starts to be shifted to the customers more and more (no longer being subsidi
AI is the Walgreen's TV screen cooler doors (Score:2)
Like, people are spending money on this bullshit, and it makes no sense.
Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:3)
So sometimes it lets him down and sometimes he's surprised at the new and ridiculous ways it lets him down.
No one could have seen this coming without way more common sense than a CTO.
Re:Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. The funny part is:
(with) "trolls gaming the system"
How could you not plan for that in advance and make it part of your test cases?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
> Indeed. The funny part is:
> (with) "trolls gaming the system"
> How could you not plan for that in advance and make it part of your test cases?
Given Taco Bell's clientele, this could be a description of physical characteristics rather than behaviour.
Serious answer, I think we all know the MBAs and techbros thought it would just work and they lack the ingenuity of one drunk redneck jonesing for some nachos.
Re: (Score:2)
> Indeed. The funny part is:
> (with) "trolls gaming the system"
> How could you not plan for that in advance and make it part of your test cases?
Because you can't compete with the efficiency with which the world creates idiots and assholes.
A software tester walks into a bar... (Score:2)
> How could you not plan for that in advance and make it part of your test cases?
A software tester walks into a bar, runs into a bar, crawls into a bar, dances into a bar, orders a beer, 2 beers, 0 beers, 99999 beers, a lizard in a beer glass, -1 beers, qwerty beers. Testing complete.
A user walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is.
The bar goes up in flames.
Re:Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:5, Insightful)
What seems frankly depressing is that a C-level would think(and quite possibly have reason to think) that that sort of aw-shucks-lessons-are-being-learned-about-things-nobody-could-have-predicted tone is exonerating outside of a fairly tiny, low stakes, test program somewhere.
It's not like having somebody take a poke at connecting a system that is supposed to be pretty OK-ish at natural language processing and text-to-speech to an ordering system is particularly unreasonable; at the scale they are operating probably more unreasonable not to; but "well, it's live in 500 locations and we've learned that a technology synonymous with prompt injections and a lack of common sense so profound it's almost a category error to suggest it could have any isn't super robust..." makes you sound unbelievably dumb and risk insensitive.
Re: (Score:2)
Well... considering that they're trying to use these AI assistants to cut down on head count and fire their co-workers, I wouldn't be shocked at all to learn that their friends are looking for way to exploit the system. If anything, Taco Bell's technology team should be expecting that.
Mod up insightful (Score:2)
and more should do it!
Re:Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is the language barrier often gets in the way. How many times have you had a problem where someone who does not speak English is the one you are talking with when you are trying to order your food? You ask for something BASIC, not trying to play mind games with them or anything, and they don't understand what you want to order. That is the situation that makes these AI order systems a good idea. Know the customer base, and the employees, and if you can eliminate the language barrier with technology, that's a positive thing.
Unless having an employee who has their entire job involve translating or dealing with the language barrier, the AI won't replace too many jobs in this case.
Re: (Score:2)
In 45 years of living and eating at cheap restaurants, I've never had this problem when going to one in the United States. Or any other country where English was the native language. Why? Because they may hire non-english speakers in the back for kitchens, dishwasher, etc they make sure cashiers and waiters speak english, and they talk to the people in back. So it's an utter non-issue. It may have niche usecases in places with large international tourist crowds, but even then you generally need to tell
Re: (Score:2)
I am far from being a conservative, and liberals tend to prefer conservatives far move than progressives, so I don't fit into that category. I've definitely had issues where the person taking orders does NOT speak enough English to be able to take a fairly simple order without it being unpleasant. A lot depends on where you are for if it's a problem or not.
Re: (Score:2)
I can't say I've ever had that problem. When it comes to quantity numbers between 1 and 10 and names of foods, these are things that people pick up on quickly - and often the name of the food is similar in their own language anyway. Or the English name is at least recognizable to a native speaker of the other language.
Customizing or special instructions can be hard, but it's also really hard for an LLM too.
Re:Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's PC-speak"? What are you talking about? It is merely MBA-babble when caught with one's pants down.
Re:Sometimes it surprises him? (Score:4, Insightful)
If your CTO thinks that Legal can solve his problems you are either Oracle or in exceptionally deep trouble.
Re: (Score:2)
This is pretty much a real life version of the "QA Engineer walks into a bar and orders -1 beers"