Just visited a self-checkout kiosk at Target and it changed my view on AI

I was at the Target on 14th Street last Tuesday and the self-checkout kept flagging my bag of apples as an unknown item. Had to wait 5 minutes for a human to override it, and it made me realize how much we rely on AI to guess stuff wrong. Maybe it's not all bad having a person there to catch the weird edge cases... Has anyone else had a moment where automation just failed in a simple way?

2 comments

2 Comments

lily_singh22d ago

And then the machine tried to charge me for my reusable bag as a rotisserie chicken.

jenny_coleman2d agoTop Commenter

Haha "tried to charge me for my reusable bag as a rotisserie chicken" - that's too good. I swear those self-checkout machines have a vendetta against people trying to do the right thing. I mean, I've had mine try to scan my hand as a box of crackers once because I was holding it too close to the sensor. It's like the machine gets confused and just grabs whatever random barcode is nearby. Maybe it's just me, but I'm pretty sure one time I saw a glitch where it said I was buying 47 watermelons when I only had like 3. Honestly, I'm just glad you didn't end up paying $6.99 for that bag like it was a bird or something.