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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the hilarious "250,000+ toppings" error, these summaries seem... fine? I would be unsurprised to learn that a human came up with them, even. Seems like pretty common/standard marketing copy.

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Maybe each one is fine in isolation - what doesn’t come across from the sample is that every single one is practically the same. If you have Uber Eats, open up the app and look through the summaries for a bunch of restaurants and you’ll see what I mean.

And besides that, this just feels like something nobody asked for that probably doesn’t sell more food compared to, for example, more pictures.

Don't worry, they'll also use AI to add more pictures, which will all look strangely similar while bearing at best passing resemblance to anything you might actually receive after placing an order.

It seems to have been at least slightly improved, but youtube video summaries suffered from this to an almost comical degree not long ago. The AI voice is already pretty recognizable and stilted, then you constrain it to avoid saying anything negative or spoilery about the video, and (presumably) don't let it remember past output. No surprise its extremely repetitive. For humans you're at least getting different people's voices, on different days, who remember that they just wrote about how the last one was a "unique look highlighting the importance of design".

Most restaurant food is all the same though because they buy everything from Sysco.

That's like saying most home cooking in the country is the same because everything comes from Walmart/Kroger/Meijer.

No, you're missing the point. A lot of casual restaurants aren't even really cooking any more. They just heat up prepared food purchased from Sysco.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/restaurant-consoli...

"A lot of" and "most" are different things.

Yes, a lot of places are not making their own jalepeno poppers. There's still plenty of stuff being made from raw ingredients all over the place.

So, I've just read a few dozen student reports, which I'm 95% sure were mostly generated by AI.

The problem isn't one page of one report. It's not even one whole report. But, the more you read, the more irritating it gets. It's hard not to notice the AIisms, and once you know them, it gets really obvious. And I know some people will say 'Oh, I say X', for any particular X, but the thing that people don't do is use some same construction at least twice a page, every page, forever.

Now, I can imagine there ends up being a bit of a battle, where AIs try to learn to write 'less AI', but for now, it's very obvious if you read enough AI generated stuff.

>It's hard not to notice the AIisms, and once you know them, it gets really obvious.

Maybe I haven't read enough uber eats descriptions to notice, but at least from the sampling above it doesn't seem too obviously AI. There might be a lot of cliche wording, but it's not even clear whether it's worse than human reviews/descriptions.

I think that's exactly the point. It's the distillation of the most common marketing copy possible, and when that tone is applied everywhere it becomes very same-y, like those cookie cutter neighborhoods where every house is the exact same. Which to some extent defeats the purpose of marketing as it doesn't stand out at all, just sanitized sameness. It's boring and a bit creepy.

That's not an error, it's what 5 Guys advertise. It's the number of combinations for their toppings.

Shouldn’t it be a lot more? Around 20 toppings in any combination and count would be 20! + 19! + 18! … no?

2^20

Does order of toppings matter?

yes, only a monster would put the pickles underneath the tomato

That sounds like an error to me. "Number of toppings" is not the same as "Number of possible combinations of toppings".

But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text between me and an overpriced burger delivered by a struggling illegal immigrant in a smoke-belching jalopy?

I know the counter-argument. "This will increase sales". You know what else would increase sales? Spending the 3.4B to replace the above with a uniformed delivery service similar to UPS. That job could pay benefits.

For the same reason the shoe industry spends billions sponsoring athletes and sports teams to hawk their gear. It's to build layer upon layer of abstractions to move the conversation away from how the sausage is made, and towards something that could justify their own bloated salaries, like promoting "sporting excellence" or "tech innovation".

> But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text

They didn't. 3.4B was their total R&B cost. Don't blame AI for your human hallucination.

Why does a fast food delivery service need a research arm in the first place? It's not exactly rocket surgery.

In most large tech companies the senior leaders want to run some vanity projects so having a research arm makes that possible. They can screw around without impacting product teams.

R&D is literally what built uber and uber eats. Research to determine the product and _development_ to build it.

My R&B cost used to amount to buying the occasional Al Green album, how times have changed

My last job did something similar. An AI blurb feature was researched and built and costs a good chunk of resources to run for no reason other than being able to tell investors AI was being used.

I proposed a solution using simple heuristics that would have accomplished the same output, would have been cheaper to build and cost next to nothing to run, but being economical, efficient and boring doesn't make exciting PowerPoint slides.

This looks like a false advertising and in this case they can't blame it on the "human error".

Right, it seems just like a marketing blip, which is bad, because marketing isn't meant to be informative, it's meant to be manipulative.

If we're using AI and we're still getting the gobbley gook nothing burger marketing word soup, then what are we doing here?

No, not everything IS rich and authentic. And no, it's not awaiting me!

they make me feel embarrassed to be human

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