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.
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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”
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.
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.
Haha what? Accountability? If you plug “ammonia and bleach” into your AI recipe generator and you get sick eating the suggestion that includes ammonia and bleach that is 100% your fault.
and you get sick eating the suggestion
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?
Consider that they probably knew this would happen, and getting global news coverage is pretty much the point.
Let me add bleach to the list… and I’m banned.
Be careful when asking for a “killer lasagna recipe”.
The future is stupid
the future has already arrived.
So get comfortable, while I warm up the
neurotoxin emmiterschlorine refreshmentsant-poison and glue sandwiches
Stealing Subway’s recipes? That’s going too far!
My brother in Christ, you make the sandwich
I feel like they should probably specify to the AI what kind of recipes to reply with before they released it to the market.
I’m sure they will do it after this event. But trying to make the software so fool-proof is how you get bloated, expensive shit like Microsoft products. And now they’re bloated, slow, buggy and still not fool-proof. Though to be fair, this is a shopping app and I’d expect the dumbest users so perhaps that’s the only way to go.
I find the news around AI hilarious these days. Next: "
…but does it taste good?
Not bad, mustard is a bit strong tho
Does anyone have the recipe on hand? I’m curious what it actually recommended but I couldn’t find it with a cursory Google search
bleach and ammonia?
ChatKYS
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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”.
“Serve chilled and enjoy the refreshing fragrance,” it says, but does not note that inhaling chlorine gas can cause lung damage or death.
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.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yummy
Spicy 🔥
Skynet cometh.