this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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If an LLM can't be trusted with a fast food order, I can't imagine what it is reliable enough for. I really was expecting this was the easy use case for the things.

It sounds like most orders still worked, so I guess we'll see if other chains come to the same conclusion.

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[–] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 7 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Tbh this is an incredibly easy fix, either cap the number of waters someone can order in software or have an override where a human takes over if an order is suspicious, there's not an infinite number of ways to fuck with this.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 53 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Capping waters fixes that one specific issue but not the problem.

A suspicious order isn't easy to define and no person who has ever participated in software development would underestimate the infinite ways a User can break software.

[–] yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There are machine learning algorithms for anomaly detection though. They actually work decently well because exploits like this do in fact differ significantly from regular orders. Because they assume all anomalies are attempted exploits, their false negative rate is rather low while their false positive rate can be a bit higher.

Taco Bell has the capability to create a decently large training set from all recorded orders (which must all be valid and non-malicious) so they shouldn't have too many issues developing this model.

If an anomaly is detected, make a human verify it is indeed an irregular order.

[–] hark@lemmy.world 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

This is handwaving, which, to be fair, describes a lot of AI "solutions". An anomaly could be as basic as a customer not wanting onions on their burger because the vast majority don't make that modification.

Now what do you do in that situation? Force orders to never have modifications? That customization is such an important feature to the point that burger king adopted it as a slogan with "have it your way".

[–] yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

The idea of anomaly detection is to project some input onto a (high dimensional), numeric output. From the training data alone, you can then see where the projections are clustered and develop a high dimensional "boundary" where everything within is known and good and everything outside is unknown and possibly bad. Since orders come in relatively slow, a human would be able to check for false positives and overwrite the computer decision.

By the way, an ideal training set is preprocessed and has duplicates removed and new orders added by recombining parts of individual orders.

For example, if we have 3 orders:

  • (Hamburger, Fries)
  • (Hamburger, Fries)
  • (Cheeseburger, Sandwich)

We could then create the following set:

  • (Hamburger)
  • (Cheeseburger)
  • (Fries)
  • (Sandwich)
  • (Hamburger, Fries)
  • (Hamburger, Cheeseburger)
  • (Hamburger, Sandwich)

And so on, and so forth. A naive variant is just taking the power set of all valid orders.

[–] hark@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

This is more complicated than just having the available menu items, the available modifications, and the limits on quantities to compare against. This is already available through the app/online ordering.

That doesn't prevent someone ordering "everything" at max quantity, which is almost certainly a "malicious" order.

[–] Link@rentadrunk.org 0 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Surely if the person making the order sees 18,000 waters they would think, hold on this doesn’t seem right maybe I should ask the customer if they really want 18,000 waters?

The same applies for the ice cream with bacon on it which was mentioned in the article. I believe a lot of these could be resolved with a bit of common sense.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

Sure, in the most extreme cases it would be obvious to the crew. But simply making mistakes at a higher rate than humans will result in a lot of unhappy customers.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

The same applies for the ice cream with bacon on it

Does it, though? Unlike the 18,000 waters, if I were working a drive through I wouldn't even blink at an order for bacon ice cream. Heck, I might make a little extra to try it for myself!

[–] Evkob@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

If you think bacon on ice cream is weird enough to cancel an order, I can only imagine you've never worked a customer service job.

[–] Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sure, but how do you distill this into a rule a computer can follow? "Suspicious" is not an objectively measurable thing that a program can just check against

[–] TheRagingGeek@lemmy.world -2 points 2 days ago

Think the easiest way would be to collect order data for at least a good number of months if not a couple years and feed it in and use that as a baseline of what a typical human order looks like, anything that deviates too far from that baseline needs to be handled by a human until someone can validate it as a good order, though I imagine you could get false positives for new menu items unless you set a reasonable instruction for items that have never appeared in the dataset before.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 points 13 hours ago

The same applies for the ice cream with bacon on it

Have you never seen what Americans eat? Bacon Creaminators are excellent.

[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The point is that loopholes in software will always exist that lead to unexpected outcomes.

In software in general? Sure, here? I really doubt it

[–] TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago

that's what happens 99% of the time. It's kinda been a trend on the anti clanker side of TikTok, just order a large amount of stuff so a human takes over and actually helps you

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Why can't a trillion dollar AI say "Sir, that's not reasonable"?

[–] BenjiRenji@feddit.org 4 points 2 days ago

Because they train these to be your cheerleader, not some back talking reasonable person.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 points 13 hours ago

because they prioritize profit acquisition.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 2 days ago

It actually crashed, per the article. Presumably because it failed a sanity check.