e527 — AI Taco Trolls

e527 — AI Taco Trolls

Author: Michael Rowe, Michael Martine, Andy Piper September 1, 2025 Duration: 28:06
Taco truck with the phrase “In tacos we trust” written across the front of the truck
Photo by Daniel Hooper 🌊 on Unsplash

Published 1 September 2025

e527 with Andy, Michael and Michael – stories about AI restaurant experiences, historical LLMs, zoetropes and a whole lot more.

After Michael R gives his impressions of the PhotoDome app, the team starts things off with a story about the AI powering Taco Bell’s drive through point of sale experience.  In the past few days, there have been a multitude of stories about the attempt to order 18,000 cups of water from the Yum Foods franchise.  Check out the conversation in the podcast and the referenced articles in the show notes below.  Continuing on the AI and restaurant theme, the team considers another article that reports on nonexistent specials that the restaurant has to deal with.  While discussing the Wired article about which jobs AI is eliminating first, Michael M (mistakenly!) references a zoom seminar on the subject from Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Digital Economy Lab.  This seminar is scheduled for 29 September, so there’s still plenty of time to register for it at the link below!  After touching on a couple of articles dealing with ChatGPT scanning conversations and instituting parental controls, the team switches to an AI use case that is very close to home for Andy’s educational background as a historian.  Check out the GitHub link to TimeCapsuleLLM below and give it a whirl for yourself! 

The team wraps up this episode with two interesting links – the trailer for the upcoming game The Expanse, and a fantastic piece of vinyl zoetrope technology from Atliens (please check out the link to see the visual for the alien abduction visuals – so cool!)

What is your favorite vinyl zoetrope?  We’d love to share it with the Games at Work audience!   Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@mastodon.social (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

PhotoDome reprise

Random Thoughts blog post: PhotoDome for visionOS

PhotoDome

Games at Work e526: Beans and Bricks (for the initial discussion on PhotoDome)

AI

The Verge article: Taco Bell’s AI drive-thru plan gets caught up on trolls and glitches

AI Business article: Taco Bell Expands AI Voice Ordering at Drive-Thrus Nationwide

BBC article: Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters

Wikipedia article: Troll

Futurism article: Local Restaurant Exhausted as Google AI Keeps Telling Customers About Daily Specials That Don’t Exist

Games at Work e522: Pointing at Doomed Fish (for how Google’s AI Overview oversimplifies)

Wired article: AI Is Eliminating Jobs for Younger Workers

Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence paper and seminar: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence

Futurism article: OpenAI Says It’s Scanning Users’ ChatGPT Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police

The Verge article: OpenAI will add parental controls for ChatGPT following teen’s death

Games at Work e524: Googlenight AI (for discussion on publishing exchanges with ChatGPT)

Ars Technica article: College student’s “time travel” AI experiment accidentally outputs real 1834 history

Github: haykgrigo3/TimeCapsuleLLM

Software

atliensofficial.com post: Leaving The World Behind Vinyl


The weekly conversation hosted by Michael Rowe, Michael Martine, and Andy Piper, Games At Work dot Biz, explores the intersection where our digital play and professional lives collide. This isn't just a review show; it's a deep dive into the technology that powers our hobbies, the business behind the leisure, and the cultural news shaping both worlds. Each episode feels like pulling up a chair with three friends who are as passionate about the craft of game development and the evolution of hardware as they are about the pure joy of finding a great new title. You'll hear specific discussions on everything from the latest graphics card impacting performance to the narrative design of an indie darling, all filtered through the lens of professionals who live in the tech space. The Games At Work dot Biz podcast operates on the belief that the games we play and the tools we use are inextricably linked, offering listeners a consistently thoughtful and engaging analysis that goes far beyond a simple score. Tune in for a regular dose of insightful commentary where the serious business of technology meets the serious fun of games.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Games At Work dot Biz
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