On Wednesday, Square unveiled a new kiosk. Like all of the company’s hardware, it’s thoughtfully designed and technologically sound — remarkably hospitable for a machine, blending touch screens, voice, evocative imagery and, of course, artificial intelligence.
“We wanted it to feel more friendly and more approachable,” Thomas Templeton, head of hardware for Square parent Block, told me in an interview.
It seems like Square designed it to be just as friendly and approachable as — maybe even more friendly and approachable than — a human staffer. It’ll to talk to you! It wants to answer your questions!
A little extra:
D magazine accused Michelin of using AI to write its Dallas guide in an very specific analysis.
Brian Reinhart, the dining critic at Dallas’s D Magazine, accused Michelin’s writers of using AI in its newest Dallas reviews. He reports it with alarming certainty.
“An analysis by D Magazine, including consultation with detection software and academic experts, shows that most or all of Michelin’s new Dallas entries were written by large language model (LLM) software, commonly known as AI,” Reinhart writes. (One of the experts he consulted is his brother, Alex Reinhart, a Carnegie Mellon professor who’s written about differences in human- and AI-generated copy.)
Michelin, with its team of inspectors that can make, break, or otherwise popularize a restaurant with just one review, denies the accusations.
“All Inspector notes appearing on the Michelin Guide website and app are developed collaboratively by the Inspection team based on their firsthand dining experiences. AI is not used in the writing of these reviews,” it said in a statement.
Reinhart defended his reporting and analysis on Reddit, where commenters quickly pointed out that AI-detection software can make mistakes. But Reinhart claims his analysis was not only able to detect the AI, it could also detect the AI model used. “Almost every new sentence was written by ChatGPT-4o or another AI platform built on 4o,” he wrote.
I trust a professional writer’s intuition — I like to think I have good gut instinct, too — but I worry we’re going to get stuck on the slippery slope of these increasingly hard-to-prove accusations. (When I expressed this to a fellow food journalist, they validated my position. “I’m not dying to get sued into the ground!” they messaged. Same, same.)
Also concerning: Will anyone care?
“If we’re featured, I’m honored,” one restaurant owner told Reinhart. “How they write, I have no comment.”
