A viral video trend in Japan has restaurants with conveyor belts competing to avoid food tampering. One chain, Kura Sushi, said it will use artificial intelligence to look for “suspicious openings and closings of sushi plate covers.” reported this week.
sushi to begin upgrading existing cameras, which are used for customers take from the conveyor belts to determine their bill, at the beginning of March. If the system detects suspicious behavior, it will alert employees.
“We want to implement our AI-operated cameras to monitor whether customers put their hand-picked sushi on their plates,” a spokesperson said. . “We are confident that we will be able to update the systems we already have to deal with this type of behavior.”
Many people in Japan have been outraged by a trend dubbed “sushi terrorism.” Videos have shown people , like licking the spoon off a container of powdered green tea. Other videos have shown customers squirting wasabi over sushi as it rolls down the conveyor belt.
which has more than 98 million views on Twitter, it showed a person licking the top of a soy sauce bottle and the rim of a tea cup before returning them to a Sushiro branch. They also licked a finger and touched a passing piece of sushi. The clip and response sent shares of Sushiro’s parent company tumbling nearly five percent.
Sushiro said he replaced all the soy sauce bottles and cleaned every cup at the affected restaurant. Like other conveyor belt sushi chains, it has enacted other policies, such as only making food to order to prevent tampering and assuring hygiene-conscious patrons that the restaurants are clean.
Kura Sushi has used AI in other ways. In 2020, the company was revealed to be . At least at the time, Kura Sushi was buying most of its tuna outside of Japan. The app was said to help him assess the quality of cuts without having to travel in the middle of a pandemic.
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