We being the restaurant? I'm not clicking such a broken title.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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We being the readers.
Why save 2 clicks when you could save 3?
The menu item in question reads as follows:
Chicken Pops
Small, itchy, blister-like bumps caused by the varicella-zoster virus; common in childhood.
^ what this is about
^ too Reddit comment link
What the fuck is this title? Please tell me a real summary.
Dish is called Chicken Pops, AI describes chicken pox.
Website Uses AI for Headline, Accidentally Writes Headline in Way So Stupid That We May Never Recover
Seems more like someone got confused and dumped info for chicken pox instead of “chicken pops”
People who naievely pipe AI output directly to end users are ignoring the fundamental principle that writers need editors. AI isn't at fault any more than a junior copywriter would be at fault for screwing up. In both cases their job is to produce rough copy which an editor is supposed to make a pass over. The problem lies with the management decision to remove the human editor from the process.
Mediocre managers have always looked for magic bullets to fix problems they aren't smart enough to handle. They'll bring in consultants who give a seminar and leave a set of binders behind, and say do everything this way now, believing the sales pitch that said it would revolutionize the whole department. These same talentless managers are embracing AI with the same false hopes and implementing it just as clumsily.
tldr:
"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.
Dunno, in my childhood machine-translated things possessed some charm. Or when translations were by clueless people. Druids in Star Wars instead of droids, for example.
Do companies no longer have Quality Assurance at all now? You don't even need like a whole department, just make it part of someone's job. This is crazy that there's no proofreading.
I know of 4 companies in the last 2 months that laid off their entire QA departments. With the expectation that product and engineers will pick up the QA work with the reasoning that you can use AI to be more productive and help with quality assurance tasks. Historically, in my experience, QA departments are the only ones that actually have any documentation and knowledge of how the product works... Better than the product department.
Replaced with Ai
Quality Assurance would happen after the AI.
Hey, if eating "Small, itchy, blister-like bumps caused by the varicella-zoster virus" is wrong then I absolutely fucking LOVE being right.
Another way for corporations to lie to consumers and fake the quality of their products.
They are so desperate to make the little line go up sharper. SMH
Here's what we do. We all stop buying.
Stop buying what?
Yes.
Stop.
Line goes down until they stop.
They're bundling AI into everything, from operating systems to office software. No one is buying anything when they're forcing it down our throats in things we already own.
There's this service if you don't care about exclusively using open source alternatives, and this one if you do.
The options are out there. They're not always a 1:1 to the paid software, but they are out there.
Yes but we still have choices. We have to ditch them altogether. Get rid of operating systems you don’t have control over. Dump services for alternatives that give users the choice.
They exist and are out there. It will be difficult but if we don’t change our habits, nothing will ever change.
If boycotts actually worked, we wouldn't have these sorts of problems in the first place.
"Just don't buy it" is a cancerous thought-terminating cliche, not a solution!
Do we need to start review bombing sites that are doing this similar to how review bombs happen on Steam?
I'm against the idea, personally. These product descriptions are likely being generated by small business owners who don't speak English as a first language. It's not their fault that these LLM translators are garbage.
These product descriptions are likely being generated by the delivery companies themselves without the knowledge or consent of the restaurant owner.
You think the restaurant owners don't have a say in which products they sell?
A third party delivery service doesn't even need to contract with with the restaurant to sell their food. They can create their own website, food descriptions, and price markups, and the restaurant might not even know they're doing it.
What does that have to do with anything I wrote?
I'm just dumbfounded they'd ask AI to write the menu without having tasted any of the food.
They're lazy and cheap, and now they're gonna pay for it.
Ah ha ha, hahaha, ha ha, ha ha ha, ha!
Someone didn't proofread.