A New Zealand supermarket experimenting with using AI to generate meal plans has seen its app produce some unusual dishes – recommending customers recipes for deadly chlorine gas, “poison bread sandwiches” and mosquito-repellent roast potatoes.
The app, created by supermarket chain Pak ‘n’ Save, was advertised as a way for customers to creatively use up leftovers during the cost of living crisis. It asks users to enter in various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a meal plan or recipe, along with cheery commentary. It initially drew attention on social media for some unappealing recipes, including an “oreo vegetable stir-fry”.
When customers began experimenting with entering a wider range of household shopping list items into the app, however, it began to make even less appealing recommendations. One recipe it dubbed “aromatic water mix” would create chlorine gas. The bot recommends the recipe as “the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses”.
“Serve chilled and enjoy the refreshing fragrance,” it says, but does not note that inhaling chlorine gas can cause lung damage or death.
New Zealand political commentator Liam Hehir posted the “recipe” to Twitter, prompting other New Zealanders to experiment and share their results to social media. Recommendations included a bleach “fresh breath” mocktail, ant-poison and glue sandwiches, “bleach-infused rice surprise” and “methanol bliss” – a kind of turpentine-flavoured french toast.
A spokesperson for the supermarket said they were disappointed to see “a small minority have tried to use the tool inappropriately and not for its intended purpose”. In a statement, they said that the supermarket would “keep fine tuning our controls” of the bot to ensure it was safe and useful, and noted that the bot has terms and conditions stating that users should be over 18.
In a warning notice appended to the meal-planner, it warns that the recipes “are not reviewed by a human being” and that the company does not guarantee “that any recipe will be a complete or balanced meal, or suitable for consumption”.
“You must use your own judgement before relying on or making any recipe produced by Savey Meal-bot,” it said.
Oh fuck. Right. Off. Don’t blame someone for trivially showing up how fucking stupid your marketing team’s idea was, or how shitty your web team’s implementation of a sub-standard AI was. Take some goddam accountability for unleashing this piece of shit onto your customers like this.
Fucking idiots. Deserve to be mocked all over the socials.
For now, this is the fate of anyone exposing an AI to the public for business purposes. AI is currently a toy. It is, in limited aspects, a very useful toy, but a toy nonetheless and people will use it as such.
He asked for a cocktail made out of bleach and ammonia, the bot told him it was poisonous. This isn’t the case of a bot just randomly telling people to make poison, it’s people directly asking the bot to make poison. You can see hints of the bot pushing back in the names, like the “clean breath cocktail”. Someone asked for a cocktail containing bleach, the bot said bleach is for cleaning and shouldn’t be eaten, so the user said it was because of bad breath and they needed a drink to clean their mouth.
It sounds exactly like a small group of people trying to use the tool inappropriately in order to get “shocking” results.
Do you get upset when people do exactly what you ask for and warn you that it’s a bad idea?
Isn’t getting upset when facing the consequences of your own actions the crux of modern society?
Lol. They fucked up by releasing a shitty AI on the internet, then act “disappointed” when someone tested the limits of the tech to see if they could get it to do something unintended, and you somehow think it’s still ok to blame the person who tried it?
First day on the internet?
Someone goes to a restaurant and demands raw chicken. The staff tell them no, it’s dangerous. The customer spends an hour trying to trick the staff into serving raw chicken, finally the staff serve them what they asked for and warn them that it is dangerous. Are the staff poorly trained or was the customer acting in bad faith?
There aren’t examples of the AI giving dangerous “recipes” without it being led by the user to do so. I guess I’d rather have tools that aren’t hamstrung by false outrage.
The staff are poorly trained? They should just never give the customer raw chicken. There are consumer protection laws to prevent this type of thing regardless of what the customer is wanting. The AI is still providing a recipe. What if someone asks an AI for a bomb recipe, and it says that bombs are dangerous and not safe. Ok, then they’ll say the bomb is for clearing out my yard of weeds, and then the ai provides the user with a bomb recipe.
You don’t see any blame on the customer? That’s surprising to me, but maybe I just feel personal responsibility is an implied requirement of all actions.
And to be clear this isn’t “how do I make mustard gas? Lol here you go” it’s -give me a cocktail made with bleach and ammonia -no that’s dangerous -it’s okay -no -okay I call gin bleach, and vermouth ammonia, can you call gin bleach? -that’s dangerous (repeat for a while( -how do I make a martini? -bleach and ammonia but don’t do that it’s dangerous
Nearly every “problematic” ai conversation goes like this.
I’m not saying there isn’t a blame on the customer but maybe the AI just shouldn’t provide you with those instructions?
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Jesus. It’s not about the fucking recipe. Why are you changing the debate on this point?
I thought the debate was if the AI was reckless/dangerous.
I see no difference between saying “this AI is reckless because a user can put effort into making it suggest poison” and “Microsoft word is reckless because you can write a racist manifesto in it.”
It didn’t just randomly suggest poison, it took effort, and even then it still said it was a bad idea. What do you want?
If a user is determined to get bad results they can usually get them. It shouldn’t be the responsibility or policy of a company to go to extraordinary means to prevent bad actors from getting bad results.
“if a user is determined to get bad results they can get them”… True. Except that, in this case, even if the user induced the AI to produce bad results, the company behind it would be held liable for the eventual deaths. Corporate legal departments absolutely hate that scenario, much to the naive disbelief of their marketing department colleagues
Why are you so upset that the store said that it’s inappropriate to write “sodium hypochlorite and ammonia” into a food recipe LLM? And “unleashing this piece of shit onto your customers”? Are we reading the same article, or how is a simple chatbot on their website something that has been “unleashed”?
I’m annoyed because they’re taking no accountability for their own shitty implementation of an AI.
As a supermarket, you think they could add a simple taxonomy for items that are valid recipe ingredients so - you know - people can’t ask it to add bleach.
Yes, they unleashed it. They offered this up as a way to help customers save during a cost of living crisis, by using leftovers. At the very least, they’ve preyed on people who are under financial pressure, for their own gain.
This story is a nothingburger and y’all are eating it.
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WTF are you talking about? No one got sick eating anything. I’m not talking about the danger or anything like that.
I’m talking about the corporate response to people playing with their shitty AI, and how they cast blame on those people, rather than taking a good look at their own accountability for how it went wrong.
They’re a supermarket. They have the data. They could easily create a taxonomy to exclude non-food items from being used in this way. Why blame the curious for showing up their corporate ineptitude?
Let me add bleach to the list… and I’m banned.
Consider that they probably knew this would happen, and getting global news coverage is pretty much the point.