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Artificial intelligence has already infiltrated the restaurant world, leading to some outrageous — and at times disgusting — fails.
As flagged on Bluesky, a random restaurant in Sikar — the capital of the Indian state of Rajasthan — has an absolutely grotesque description listed for an otherwise normal appetizer on the delivery website Zomato.
“Small, itchy, blister-like bumps caused by the varicella-zoster virus,” the dish description from Sikar’s Royal Roll Express restaurant reads. “Common in childhood.”
A misreading of the dish name in question — “Chicken Pops” — could well explain why an AI may have spat out a description for what sounds an awful lot like chicken pox, a common childhood virus that causes the exact kind of nasty “blister-like bumps” detailed on the menu.
Though that doesn’t satisfactorily justify why that menu description still up on Zomato, some more level-headed Redditors offered theories between goofy “shingles” jokes.
As one user on the r/MildlyInfuriating subreddit noted, the US-based delivery service DoorDash will often use AI to automatically add in dish details, and will sometimes do so even if the restaurant provided its own summaries.
“I have found that if local places don’t provide long-ish descriptions on their dishes (if they say something like ‘Chicken with vegetables’), DoorDash automatically replaces the store-provided description with an AI-generated description,” the user wrote. “It’s annoying because I have had a few times where I’ve ordered something and it doesn’t match the description.”
Despite being an entirely different service from DoorDash, there is some evidence that Zomato — which recently laid off 600 customer support workers after announcing a new AI chatbot for consumers — may use AI to generate menu items. In 2020, the India-based company announced that it would be digitizing physical menus with the help of machine learning, and would do so “without any human input required.”
Though Zomato later instated a ban on AI images in 2024, no such ban has been brought down for AI-generated menu descriptions, which means that incorrectly-digitized dish summaries may well still be up on the site.
We’ve reached out to Zomato to ask whether it uses AI to generate text for menu items like the aforementioned “Chicken Pops” description and to see whether the company will take any action for that glaring mistake or any other.
Still, it’s a pretty hilarious example of the many ways AI integration can go horribly wrong — and unless that appetizer from Royal Roll Express actually has chicken pox in it, it seems pretty innocuous too.
More on AI fails: McDonald’s Idiotic AI Hiring System Just Leaked Personal Data About Millions of Job Applicants
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