Is AI making people act weird at restaurants?

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Brian Lehrer (0:40)

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. All right, for our last 10 minutes or so, we want to know from you, how is AI changing the restaurant experience, either as a diner or a restaurant worker or owner?

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Why do we ask? Well, think about the last time you were at a restaurant. Maybe you were waiting on a table or the kitchen got your order slightly wrong or your steak came out a little more done than you asked for. What did you do about it? Maybe you sighed, maybe you flagged down your server, but would you ever go home and write a seven paragraph formal complaint demanding an explanation, a prevention plan and compensation? Yeah, you get it. It's an AI thing. Increasingly, restaurant owners say that's exactly what's landing in their inbox, a lot of it written by chat bots. And that's just one piece of it. AI is picking the wine, counting the macros, even booking the tables, sometimes badly. Add in tables that go viral on social media, and restaurant staff say customers are behaving more strangely than ever. Our guests on this talk to the owners and managers on the front lines of the dining room. Elizabeth Gunn writes the food newsletter Consumed, and she's the author of a recent piece in New York Magazine titled, Why are people acting so weird in restaurants? Elizabeth, welcome to WNYC.

Elizabeth Gunn (2:12)

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer (2:14)

We'll see if we get any stories from listeners, either as diners or restaurant workers.

But why don't you start with the complaints? One restaurant executive you spoke with estimate that about half the emails she reads from unhappy diners are written by chat bots now.

Elizabeth Gunn (2:29)

Yeah, that particular person was the starting point for this story. That was a story that came to me via my editor at New York Magazine, who said, I have this friend of a friend who works for a big restaurant group, and she says that something weird is happening. In the last year, the complaint emails have totally changed. They've become way more numerous, and they are clearly written by chat bots, many of them at least.

Do we think this is a thing? We weren't sure, but I started calling around and talking to restaurant owners and restaurant workers, and found that not only was that experience getting more common for more restaurants, but that AI and apps were interfering with the dining experience in a lot of ways that I didn't expect.

Brian Lehrer (3:18)

Go ahead, sorry.

Elizabeth Gunn (3:19)

Yeah, so one of those would be, you mentioned it, the chat bots choosing wine. You know, people sitting down for a nice dinner are often at a fancy restaurant, and instead of talking to the small yay, pulling up Claude or pulling up ChatGPT and saying, you know, Claude, what wine should I order?

Brian Lehrer (3:38)

Listener text, if the menu looks to AI generated, I'm skipping it. What's a tell that a menu is AI generated? Do you have any?

Elizabeth Gunn (3:48)

I mean, that's one that I had not heard, an AI generated menu. What I was mostly hearing was from the other side of the equation, which was restaurant workers and restaurant owners talking about the ways in which guests were inviting AI and technology into the experience. Now, I will say that in these conversations, restaurants did talk about how AI is useful to them with some of the back office work that just needs to get done and has made that easier for them, so scheduling, ordering, but nobody copped to using AI to make a menu.

Brian Lehrer (4:24)

Here's a little follow up on that. It's from a different listener, but they write, AI is being abused in creating menus for huge restaurant companies. Chefs are given menus that don't make sense and with no creativity.

Elizabeth Gunn (4:38)

Does that ring true? That sounds like a great follow on story. I mean, that it certainly could be happening. One thing that I did hear from one of the conversations I had with a sommelier was that, yes, they did see guests choosing wine using chatbots, but that what you might not know if you're a guest in a restaurant with a wine professional with a sommelier is that a lot of young sommeliers are using chatbots and Claude to help give you wine recommendations. And that may just be an extension of behavior that's been there ever since people had a smartphone with Google. But that you can't expect, think about the number of wine professionals there are in the city or the country or the world. And you can't expect them all to be world experts on every bottle of wine.