Pizza Hut's AI system caused 'cascading' problems and $100M in damages, franchisee alleges in new suithttps://www.businessinsider.com/pizza-hut-ai-system-dragontail-lawsuit-franchisee-2026-5
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Can't wait for all the "no but it's not the AI, they implemented it wrong" replies.
Somehow whenever slop generators are involved, however incidentally, in something that can be claimed to work, it's "AI DID A THING".
But when they end up causing problems it's "human error" or "implemented it poorly" or some other form of good old "you're holding it wrong".
@rysiek I have the same issue with deductive logic applied to the real world.
'Everybody is just "doing it wrong", it's really a good tool, otherwise.'
Somehow the total preponderance of "human error" in that domain is not a fundamental fault in the tool, can't be, it's infallible, you know!!
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Pizza Hut's AI system caused 'cascading' problems and $100M in damages, franchisee alleges in new suit
https://www.businessinsider.com/pizza-hut-ai-system-dragontail-lawsuit-franchisee-2026-5> A top Pizza Hut franchisee says the chain's rollout of an AI-powered delivery system turned once-speedy pizza orders into a cold, late-arriving mess — and cratered a business that had been outperforming nearly every other operator in the system.
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There are mentions of it several times, though.
The failure here is a particular one, not the usual hallucinations - The company wanted to make something, anything at all, with "AI".
So they replaced a functioning system that had purpose-guided information flows with "something, anything with 'AI'".
And because it was "with 'AI'" no thought was given to the purposes involved, old knowledge was disregarded, and I am willing to bet, SMEs were told to "work with it, not against it" or "fail fast so we can improve it", without actually checking if this "something, anything" was a good idea. -
Can't wait for all the "no but it's not the AI, they implemented it wrong" replies.
Somehow whenever slop generators are involved, however incidentally, in something that can be claimed to work, it's "AI DID A THING".
But when they end up causing problems it's "human error" or "implemented it poorly" or some other form of good old "you're holding it wrong".
@rysiek@mstdn.social > The complaint says DoorDash drivers began waiting to batch multiple orders together after gaining virtual visibility into kitchen systems, allowing them to see when pizzas would come out of the oven. Instead of immediately leaving with a completed order, the suit claims drivers waited "up to fifteen (15) minutes" for additional deliveries[...]
The lawsuit also alleges Dashers could see tip amounts and whether orders were cash payments, making some drivers less likely to accept certain deliveries.
this one really is "just" a labor problem (food delivery services underpay while doing over-optimized pay schemes to the drivers) / suboptimal product decision (oversharing someone else's data) that's not unique to AI though, unless we assume that some AI did the entirety of PM's job and got rubberstamped. One can share the kitchen data in plain text with drivers and get the same outcome.
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Can't wait for all the "no but it's not the AI, they implemented it wrong" replies.
Somehow whenever slop generators are involved, however incidentally, in something that can be claimed to work, it's "AI DID A THING".
But when they end up causing problems it's "human error" or "implemented it poorly" or some other form of good old "you're holding it wrong".
@rysiek «The complaint says DoorDash drivers began waiting to batch multiple orders together after gaining virtual visibility into kitchen systems»
This sounds like an intentional plan to extract money from restaurants and pump it into the gatekeepers' bank accounts (a joint DoorDash/Pizza Hut goal I presume).
The main contribution of "AI" is presumably the hope that it provides plausible deniability for said high street robbery.
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@rysiek unpaywalled link https://archive.is/6NvBm
When possible, use archive.org
archive.today also owns the urls:
archive.fo
archive.is
archive.li
archive.md
archive.ph
archive.vn
Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links
If DDoSing a blog wasn't bad enough, archive site also tampered with web snapshots.
Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
Archive.today has begun rolling out Google's reCaptcha as well, which is concerning when it can be altered.
I do not have evidence, but I can see how this could possibly be a malware vector in the future.
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@rysiek I have the same issue with deductive logic applied to the real world.
'Everybody is just "doing it wrong", it's really a good tool, otherwise.'
Somehow the total preponderance of "human error" in that domain is not a fundamental fault in the tool, can't be, it's infallible, you know!!
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@jeantranscene @rysiek
Exactly.
If the tool doesn't work in your domain, do NOT use the tool in that domain.Should be simple.
And yes, the irony of it all is that as bad as deduction is in the domain of reality, it's relatively good in computing.
And the fuckers go and invent a stochastic tool so they can suck just as badly in computing as deduction sucks in the real world.
Amazing. We´re the problem. Humanity is a fuck.
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@rysiek «The complaint says DoorDash drivers began waiting to batch multiple orders together after gaining virtual visibility into kitchen systems»
This sounds like an intentional plan to extract money from restaurants and pump it into the gatekeepers' bank accounts (a joint DoorDash/Pizza Hut goal I presume).
The main contribution of "AI" is presumably the hope that it provides plausible deniability for said high street robbery.
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Pizza Hut's AI system caused 'cascading' problems and $100M in damages, franchisee alleges in new suit
https://www.businessinsider.com/pizza-hut-ai-system-dragontail-lawsuit-franchisee-2026-5> A top Pizza Hut franchisee says the chain's rollout of an AI-powered delivery system turned once-speedy pizza orders into a cold, late-arriving mess — and cratered a business that had been outperforming nearly every other operator in the system.
@rysiek Isn't this funny. Some corporate suit went all in with Ai to save hundreds of millions and instead of this idiot getting fired without any bonuses, they'll just fire 5000 people to compensate for the fuckup. And the idiot who pushed this, even if he leaves the company, he's leaving it with a bonus. Fuck up and even be rewarded for it. It's totally fucked way of doing business.
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Pizza Hut's AI system caused 'cascading' problems and $100M in damages, franchisee alleges in new suit
https://www.businessinsider.com/pizza-hut-ai-system-dragontail-lawsuit-franchisee-2026-5> A top Pizza Hut franchisee says the chain's rollout of an AI-powered delivery system turned once-speedy pizza orders into a cold, late-arriving mess — and cratered a business that had been outperforming nearly every other operator in the system.
@rysiek @LoganFive Sounds like it’s more like $100m in lost revenue that was stolen from gig workers to begin with.
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Can't wait for all the "no but it's not the AI, they implemented it wrong" replies.
Somehow whenever slop generators are involved, however incidentally, in something that can be claimed to work, it's "AI DID A THING".
But when they end up causing problems it's "human error" or "implemented it poorly" or some other form of good old "you're holding it wrong".
This rhymes closely to when the free-market capitalists complain that their policies of deregulation of financial regulation and austerity for the poor produce nothing but market crashes and more hardship it's because they didn't get to do it hard enough, not because they're the wrong policies.
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@rysiek I hate so-called AI, but in this case it seems to me it was more a "problem" of "giving a little more knowledge and power to delivery drivers"?
@jollysea the "problem" was integrating an AI boondoggle (Dragontail) poorly and without understanding the full extent of possible consequences.
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@notyourfanboy and that exposure was caused by integrating an AI boondoggle (Dragontail) poorly and without understanding the full extent of consequences.
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@rysiek If you read further...
> The complaint says DoorDash drivers began waiting to batch multiple orders together after gaining virtual visibility into kitchen systems, allowing them to see when pizzas would come out of the oven.
> Instead of immediately leaving with a completed order, the suit claims drivers waited "up to fifteen (15) minutes" for additional deliveries, increasing the time between when a pizza is removed from the oven rack and when it leaves the building to be delivered. That delay slowed deliveries, disappointed customers, and caused a sharp drop in sales, the suit says.
@haliphax and if you read earlier:
> In a lawsuit filed on May 6 in Texas Business Court, franchisee Chaac Pizza Northeast accused Pizza Hut of forcing stores to adopt Dragontail, a delivery-management platform that Pizza Hut described as using artificial intelligence to "optimize" food delivery, despite what the suit calls obvious incompatibilities with Chaac's business model.
Dragontail is an "AI" startup, so this is a case of integrating an AI boondoggle poorly leading to a bad outcome.
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@rysiek Not exactly right: “Instead of immediately leaving with a completed order, the suit claims drivers waited ‘up to fifteen (15) minutes’ for additional deliveries, increasing the time between when a pizza is removed from the oven rack and when it leaves the building to be delivered. The lawsuit also alleges Dashers could see tip amounts and whether orders were cash payments, making some drivers less likely to accept certain deliveries.”
The AI software did exactly what it was supposed to do. The delivery drivers were never meant to have that much access.
@mighty_orbot pretty exactly right actually – AI software was integrated poorly and without properly assessing the consequences, leading to a bad outcome.
I am going to *bet* there was someone there saying "but this will cause this exact problem" and was silenced "because AI".
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@rysiek @LoganFive Sounds like it’s more like $100m in lost revenue that was stolen from gig workers to begin with.
@FeloniousPunk @LoganFive no doubt. The root cause is capitalism.
