AI assistant named for long-dead pharmacy founder mutters incomprehensibly and "demands that you talk to him"
Customers "have no idea they agreed to it." Kinney Drugs' AI assistant for prescription refills was implemented earlier this summer and VTDigger reports that customers hate it. One told them her phone rings nearly every day and she hears an "incomprehensible mutter." If she expresses approval she gets drugs she doesn't need: "I've got four bottles of something that I take twice a week sitting here." Delays have grown between physicians ordering drugs and the pharmacy processing them. The system has been unable to locate longtime customer accounts, has ordered incorrect dosages and has failed to notify customers when refills were ready for pickup.
- ▪Customers "have no idea they agreed to it." Kinney Drugs' AI assistant for prescription refills was implemented earlier this summer and VTDigger reports that customers hate it.
- ▪One told them her phone rings nearly every day and she hears an "incomprehensible mutter." If she expresses approval she gets drugs she doesn't need: "I've got four bottles of something that I take twice a week sitting here." Delays have gr
- ▪The system has been unable to locate longtime customer accounts, has ordered incorrect dosages and has failed to notify customers when refills were ready for pickup.
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| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/07/30/ai-assistant-named-for-long-dead-pharmacy-founder-mutters-incomprehensibly-and-demands-that-you-talk-to-him.html |
| Publication time | Fri, 31 Jul 2026 01:28:38 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-31T01:42:39.888Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-31T01:42:39.888Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 2TKLKukHlxxW · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI assistant named for long-dead pharmacy founder mutters incomprehensibly and "demands that you talk to him" Rob Beschizza 6:28 pm Thu Jul 30, 2026 Burt Kinney (left) and Burt the AI assistant (right) A Vermont pharmacy chain's new AI assistant led not to the efficiency improvements promised but to "delays, incorrect information and privacy concerns." The AI, named "Burt" after the chain's long-dead founder, is said to suggest the wrong refills on sensitive medications, among other alarming problems. Customers "have no idea they agreed to it." Kinney Drugs' AI assistant for prescription refills was implemented earlier this summer and VTDigger reports that customers hate it.
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