For example, at my local preschool there was a wall flyer with information about what to bring the swimming pool. It had the most crudely drawn fishes and crabs and seahorses that I had ever seen. It was clear that whoever drew that had no prior experience with anything even remotely resembling a pencil, and by no metric one would define those drawings as "good". Maybe it was drawn by a janitor, or a teacher with too little time to waste on a drawing? Regardless, and I cannot emphasize it enough, I VASTLY preferred it to the new AI generated one they put up, with its generic AI generated marine life that one would get if they just typed "sea life" in the prompt. I can't tell you why myself, if you were to look at both versions side by side, the AI one is undoubtably miles better. But... it just feels wrong. Off. Out of place. I know I sound like a luddite, but it just doesn't look right. It's uncanny, and I really can't explain the reason. It's like seeing a perfectly drawn, realistic, anatomically accurate human being in an otherwise cute and cuddly children's cartoon. It just doesn't fit in with everything else. It's a preschool, it's supposed to be filled with "bad" drawings, you know?
And don't get me started with the time they put up AI filtered group photos. I almost had a meltdown, and I'm (mostly) pro AI.
Beauty standards, for example, track directly alongside what a body looks like when the owner has free time to spend on leisure. For example, a tan in some cultures used to be ugly and pale skin more beautiful because a tan meant you worked outside in the sun and pale skin meant you could be inside, doing a higher status job or not working. Now, pale means stuck inside working and tan means going outside for leisure. This is suddenly changing, because “being healthy” means you have time to do this.
In the media and art we consume, the amount of human effort involved drives how much we subconsciously value it. Subtle indicators of human involvement in writing, for example, will make us like the writing more. A video clearly made by a real human will be more entertaining. Just like a meal cooked at home by some with passion for the art will always taste better than a chain restaurant meal, even if the restaurant meal is technically more complicated or uses better ingredients.
As AI takes over more and more, its direct output and stuff that smells like its direct output is going to be less and less desirable.
There is a TON of market opportunity in business for people who truly understand this.
The posters all look good - much better than their desktop publishing predecessors. And yet they also eat away at the credibility of the event or business for me.
It's hard to trust a poster when the quality of the design has zero relation to the amount of effort that went into creating it.
But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds?
There’s a big reason more expensive restaurants don’t have pictures on their menus, even when they’re the best equipped to ensure your meal matches the picture.
Similar to someone just scrawling a sandwich board sign in chalk (which at this point I would prefer).
Businesses will stand out from a taste perspective by continuing to hire human effort to make recognisable human output.
https://preview.redd.it/the-peas-are-upside-down-v0-5pwo713b...
Apart from that image generation is just the wrong idea for flyers since the resolution they put out is never enough for 300 DPI, the image always looks low-quality, the edges of the text are blurry and so on. Also the fact that the images in the picture look nothing like the real thing is unethical.
I think you could have an AI system that makes menus correctly: the restaurant would take (amateur) pictures of all their menu items, give the system the names, descriptions, prices and so on, then the agent could use Nano Banana or something like that to give the images consistent lighting and angles, use a different model to remove the backgrounds and then write a menu in the desired sizes using HTML. That way the text could be perfect, the images could look like what you actually get.
I was looking at the documentation for cruft the other day and it's mascot is absolutely glorious. Not because it displays any semblance of "good taste", but just because it is the polar opposite of AI generated blandness[0].
Who knows - maybe in the future we'll start embracing signals of human amateurishness and ms-paint created menus filled with comic sans will take off.
I genuinely think AI companies need to worry more about their brand. Just through how their products are used, they are perceived as a marker for low quality.
I don’t get how AI images like this don’t open them up to false advertising lawsuits
The craziest offense I have ever seen was (in Germany) an add for a Turkish Kokoreç sandwich where they had a picture of the entire spit of the kokereç being cooked, unchopped, sitting in a bun!!
Someones definitely going to write a think piece about how this erases aesthetic identity of cities and cultures.
Looks like absolute ass too, easily beaten even by something designed by someone completely naive to design/art, good sign of a place to avoid.
We’ll inevitably end up feeling nostalgic for these mid-2020s AI slop menus, much like how graphic design of the 90s and 2000s is revered (see other comments on this post) even while during its making was regarded as garish
So until more people frequenting restaurants care it’s a relatively low risk and low cost way to update your menu.
And at least for me the negative reaction is most extreme for food. Because the one clear message that using GenAI output sends is, "I didn't care." And is that really the message you want to send when you're trying to sell food?
These pictures have spread particularly much on food trucks around here, and my strict rule is that I won't even try any of them. If you have so little confidence in your dishes that you don't even want to show me a picture of it, why should I trust it and put it in my body?
It shows the most extreme lack of caring, for a business category where care is one of the things most important to me. You know that someone proud of their cooking isn't going to cut corners or serve you something they don't stand behind. This shows they have no such pride, so I'm going to assume they by extension also have no such things as hygiene standards. G
My partner and I usually just give a one star review each on Google when we pass by a place like this and then carry on.
From there, it's two possibilities:
-They care about the food at the expensive of design and it's going to be cheap and great (good) -They care about the food as much as the design and it's going to suck (bad)
This switch happened after a new place opened in my neighborhood that had AI signage and is now my favorite lunch spot.
There's always a class of restaurants where they don't care about repeat visitors. Think the cafe in front of a major tourist attraction: every day brings a new busload of 1-time patrons, those will always want the michelin-level pics to bait the 1-time foot-traffic in. The danger is the neighborhood mom-and-pops will start using the same trick without understanding they need repeat customers, and repeat disappointment kills a repeat audience.
But who knows... people with a TV budget have been using glue in their cheesy pizza commercials, soap in their beer glass foam, and motor oil on their pancake stacks for a long time -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k7PJoNAXkk -- maybe this is just equalizing the enshittified food playing field.
I was under the impression that FTC laws require food advertisement photos to be the "real" thing. I don't know if the FTC covers food service but if so I wonder if they just don't want to bother slapping restaurants with fines over generated product images in menus (or if menus just aren't covered by the same regulation). Also I wonder if there's some grey area when it pertains to "photos" vs "generated images" (though the latter is clearly intended to stand in for the former).
The irony is that you could very well get AI to make a menu that looks far better, but whoever did this is clearly putting about as much care into it as the restaurant puts into plate presentation.
It doesn’t really matter, a Philippine Hawaiian restaurant is probably not long for this world anyways. Most restaurants aren’t.
which I don't think people would find misleading. Right now it looks pretty "AI" but wouldn't be hard to find a style that works well.
Thought it was going to be something about website nav bars..
And menus are as much of an after thought. Some places have old printouts with faded pictures on the wall, unreadable specials on some chalk board, or just a cheap sheet of paper as a menu. There are exceptions of course. Some restaurants are clearly friendly with good designers. But mostly restaurants don't seem to overthink this.
The issue isn't AI but the simple fact that many small business owners aren't very good at this stuff to begin with. They never were.
Future alien confusion is all that Gen-AI pictures add. There is no value to them that is remotely redeeming/useful to us today.
Do you also hate if they use microwave, cooked on induction, used wrong type of oil, antibiotic meat, pesticidal vags, chemical cleaners, unethical coffee and people who work there are wrong race/gender/sexuality?
Why would you do this to your business? I always found generic photobank stuff to be the worst, but apparently the bar can go lower.
So far none seem to be gaining traction.
To me it just sets such a low bar for effort on such a basic part of the experience that I assume the rest of the experience and the food is similar trash.
seemingly just like the OP i don't hail from japan, where you need to be careful with how you represent the food in your menu. in the DTP days, i have seen random stock images to represent dishes that never makes my table. to me it gives a similar energy.
while everyone has their own technical capabilities, but you still have the final say on what to print. rest is a matter of taste.
What makes me feel almost physical disgust is the food in AI generated posters or menus. There’s something deeply uncannily unappetizing about the food. And once I can identify it as AI generated, it’s even worse… there’s something almost creepy about knowing the image is a computers best approximation of something humans want to ingest.
I cannot understand how a food establishment that takes themselves seriously would want to use generative assets like this… can’t they see how unappetizing their own food looks??
Well one could argue that the menu now features _more_ spam than the actual dish.
But now many of us have been trained to detect slop from miles away so it just comes across as cheap.
I often feel the same way when I glance at a project’s documentation and it’s long and full of markdown styles and emojis: “the author didn’t think about the users at all, they just wanted to get this over with quickly, so now I have to be super suspicious of everything I read here and it might end up being a huge waste of my time”. A few years ago I’d probably think “wow, emojis!”
Why TF did he blur all the prices of the menu in the pictures?
- dish in the top left is not on the menu (why is it there)
-- why is there a malnourished cow on the menu?
++ photos of of the product so you can see what you are gonna get
--- the photos do not match the actual meal
Now, they don't have to pay for or manage delivery people, or pay anyone to make their menus for them.
There are no consequences to lying. People have a bad experience sure, but they'll forget next time they order off grubhub and simply search for "burrito near me" and click on the first good looking food.
I do not understand the author's aversion. Sure we can talk about "picture of food" vs "what was served" but have you been... anywhere? This is the reality of all food advertisement. I've never in my life been served a plate of food that perfectly matched the picture unless it was a user-uploaded image. Getting a decent idea of what the dish looks like is valuable (especially for unfamiliar cuisine, obviously not unfamiliar to the author but I'd wager unfamiliar to most patrons).
Being anti-LLM/AI for the sake of it is boring. Show me mistakes on the menu or a level of unreality higher than the food industry at large and I'll care but I'm not seeing the problem here.
But this year they replaced their previously obviously-English-as-second-language-but-informative descriptions with just total slop that say absolutely nothing at all about the rice you’re buying. Every description is just platitudes about how good the rice is.
So as in TFA we get people who seemingly can’t resist “pressing the button” and getting nice shiny results even if they aren’t, like, good. It’s nuts. FWIW I emailed the rice shop and politely asked them to revert to the old descriptions but received no reply.
> Yes I also understand many of them have slim margins, but TBH I would rather read a whole menu in Comic Sans, Papyrus, or Curlz MT than this garbage.
I don’t think it matters what principled vs ignorant people think but rather how many of each kind there are. Put differently, does the average person care?
Would they prefer a text only menu or an AI slop one, when the budget for making either is basically 0$?
Who the average customer is also might change based on generation (younger people might be more averse to AI, or maybe not really and the ones who are averse are louder), and probably also how used to AI slop people get.
It's a shame because it takes away the choice of either seeing the real product, or imagining it - I'm left with this shitty generated impression of what the food won't look like.
1. make the dish
2. take a photo of the dish
3. say "hey AI, touch this photo up to make it look nicer"
and you'd get way better results than this samey slop that looks nothing like what you'll actually be served?
Sure, it is is an environmental disaster, churned out in industrial quantities, low-effort, an emulsified layer of mediocrity, slop everywhere, fouls the air for miles around; but that's true of AI, too.
This should count as a form of segregation against such minority.
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Not heartbreaking, but the ones that get my goat up most are flyers from craft fairs and worse places promising to teach crafts/arts. How is that not a sign to walk very quickly in the other direction? Or maybe it is intentional, like some bad spam text apparently being intentional to weed out the people who are less likely to fall from the scam anyway…
The only reason this question is answerable is because the poster saw the old sign. When everybody is gone who saw the old sign, they'll just continue doing it for no reason. When somebody asks about it, some creep will babble about Chesterton's Fence.
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This is such a weird thing to get worked up over.
Still, while "it's AI generated crap" and variations thereof are all perfectly valid reasons by themselves, they are way, WAY too shallow for the average guy who looks at both versions and prefers the AI one because it looks "better". I would probably sound crazy and/or pretentious trying to explain to him why I prefer the badly drawn one to the perfect AI generated one, I do not know exactly why myself.
You already sound pretentious - that ship sailed a long time ago. This is one of these moments in life that doesn’t matter one bit.
TBH, most of those menus just looked like pre-AI menus to me...
Humans are social creatures. We crave a personal touch in things. That's why we idealize the small shop. But we're also risk averse. It's easier to eat at a big chain restaurant than to take a chance at a local place.
Just look at the country music industry. It's practically an assembly line for "small town nostalgia" slop. And yet small towns are the worst for defecting to Walmart or Dollar General.
Is this... irony?
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If it was never about objective quality, Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Eye of Argon would be highly regarded, not the butt of jokes and drinking games.
And those are the examples so infamous that they get to have the honour of being laughed at, there are many more which simply fade into obscurity from their ineptness.
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And I think it’s ultimately the same sort of thing? If in your marketing materials you don’t value craft and you take the shortest path rather than embrace your constraints and produce something good within them, then that’s maybe a negative signal about how you treat the thing you actually do.
IME the people I know who embody great craft in a field… they care about it in everything they do, and they don’t do a thing unless they can do it with care. I think sloppy AI is just a very strong signal of someone who doesn’t follow that.
I'm not convinced. This rule holds only if the two "things" are related. But one can have a passion for serving the best quality coffee, and be a total wreck in graphic arts.
AI-generated art signals that you didn't put effort in, and so aren't passionate about the experience, and so aren't really passionate about the central thing.
"At least you tried" is not a high standard, but it's the one that AI art fails.
ah the inverse of the "i'm good at coding, therefore i am good at everything."
I want my restaurants to have delicious food; I don't expect them to have (or hire) graphic designers. Every dollar spent on design is a dollar that is not going to the quality of my food.
The hate on AI menus is irrational, unless eating at a specific place is meant for its societal signaling value rather than for its food.
Fully agreed. It's one reason I've taken to doing more things myself at home. I don't even go to coffee shops anymore, I just make coffee at home. For the price of a month's coffee at a local shop, I bought the equipment and learned by practice and watching a lot of James Hoffman (and others) on YouTube. One thing my father taught me that's really stuck with me is: "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right." That's not just about caring about what you do to get it right, it's also about caring if you're spending your time doing the right things. I do a whole lot less these days than I used to, because I realized a lot of the stuff I used to do was performative or just a waste of time with no upside. The things I do now though, I put my heart and soul into, because I get in return more value/enjoyment from having done it correctly and at its absolute best or at least at my absolute best.
Seeing sloppy work or AI output in the flesh is a hard negative signal for me that I won't engage with a business. Online I see AI output as a signal that whatever business I may be engaging with is probably a scam/scammer. I see interesting things advertised on my feed but hardly ever buy because most of the time their website is clearly AI generated and I have no feeling of assurance that the product is even real or valuable. Something that has had no human thought or reason applied to it is not going to solve any legitimate problem, and therefore I am not going to spend money on it no matter how good it looked in the fraction of a second I saw it in an ad. Seeing that AI output is almost like a stop-break, that lets me think through whether or not its worth having at all.
Hopefully, your daughter just politely nodded her head, and did not actually listen to you.
A friend also called this the “Party Cannon effect”, in reference to black metal festival posters. When lavish detail is available at the push of a button, simplicity stands out far more.
My knee-jerk reaction is instant credibility loss for the business/person/thing.
Follow-on is sadness (what are we losing in society because of this?), and curiosity: if a polished appearance (even if it is mega plastic) is no longer a sign of quality, then what is? What signals do I need to look for now?
But, wait! Was a high degree of polish ever truly a sign of quality? I've certainly had experiences where a place made every effort to look polished and professional (and generally did a good job at it), but quality missed the mark. In the case of restaurants, a common refrain of mine used to be, "they're trying too hard in the wrong places." Now, I guess, they don't have to try too hard... but they're still not focusing in the right places.
I don't know what to make of it and I go back to still trying to figure out new (or old?) signals for quality.
Not sure how diffusion models work in detail so consider this wet neural slop, but I feel like the training data had a sizable portion of it of high quality art, photography, design, and the models captured mostly the polish: the crispiness, the geometry, the contrast: they're after all computable features. It's more difficult to capture the meaningful blurs, the deliberate deviations, and the organic rule breaking. They're properties much harder to "featurize" for, and rely on tags/labeling/descriptions, etc of variable quality.
By all means you can get that with AI anyway, but it also requires you to understand the art itself, and describe it in a way the model produces satisfactory results.
AI produces apparent uniformity, it makes it harder to distinguish the quality of the underlying process. Same thing happens in all fields, we are all harder to differentiate, then why would you pick me over the others? this is the hard question we are facing now, and it's a desperate situation to be in. Not just artists and people looking for a job, but also companies to their investors and products to customers. All harder to tell apart.
I think this drives a lot of the AI craze. If I can't own my niche anymore, what is my new specialization? We have no answers yet. We have seen this kind of total competition in a domain with cheap imitation in SEO and slop writing.
They all look awful to me, visually extremely busy, nowhere to focus. The text is the same. Useless text and visual details everywhere, no opinion about what's important shining through, nothing to focus on.
Your comment is an example of something that seems to accrue around AI users: casual, even gleeful, spite. You don't get this with every technology; there is no significant strand of the pro-3D printing community, for example, that goes around taunting people who don't use printers themselves.
It's significant, I think, that this sort of attitude is common around AI, but not other technologies, and it does have a meaningful impact on public attitudes around it. I'm not sure whether it's a result of using AI, or a characteristic that leads to a propensity for AI, but there's something here.
And then they notified us by means of an ai-generated poster involving a photorealistic image of a violinist and pianist playing in an office setting. But not the actual artists, no, fake real artists.
And I feel like that is such an insult to the actual artists? Like, these are real, actual people, with real skills, that are doing real work, and apparently that's the same as these two fake non-existant people?
So yeah, I share your sentiment. But I may just be old woman shouting at clouds with the old man.
With the OP and restaurant menus in general, and to some extent here, it also feels like false advertising: You’re showing an illustration that’s not even based on the real product or people.
A cursory glance at YouGov strongly suggests that people have bad vibes about AI in basically every territory where they're asked about it, and for basically every use-case
In fact, it can be precisely because they can't tell the difference that they would be concerned about consuming AI outputs when they don't know they are. If someone wants to take a stand and only read human text and human art then we may need regulation to add notices when text and images are LLM outputs.
But soulless corporate bullshit was the same before "AI". It doesn't matter how it was produced, it's just that "AI" does it faster and cheaper.
So it doesn't have to be machine generated, just looking like it is is enough.
Tale as old as time: a race to the bottom. Businesses trying to cut corners, thinking they can offset it against losses from exiting customers. If it wasn't, a lot will just cut more corners.
These businesses weren't paying someone to make a flier. The business owner was sweating for an hour in Microsoft Word and producing something that looked terrible.
I expect they are now investing approximately the same about of time iterating in ChatGPT and producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.
I said it elsewhere in this thread differently but people want to pretend the options are:
1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster
OR
2. Use AI
It's not, the money is often just not there to pay someone. So you get whatever the intern or the owner can slap together in whatever tool they know best (which is rarely the best tool for the job).
It's completely understandable that they would reach for LLMs to help improve their posters.
So many people are anti-AI/anti-LLM just because it is AI/LLM, not because it's objectively worse than the alternative. It's tiring.
It's the Electron vs Native argument all over again. Sure, we'd all love hand-crafted, beautiful, low-resource native applications for everything, that takes a lot of time and/or money. It's a decision between Native and Electron, it's a decision between Electron or nothing (or at best only 1 OS supported).
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Maybe I’m misunderstanding but I haven’t seen many that I’d say look “good”. Especially food related ones.
I think it would be better if consumers stopped using burning money as a measure of whether to buy something.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/terminator/images/e/e9/Tdf...
With my mere B1 German, I'm not entirely sure if the pun would even work in German, despite "Vorhangen": translated puns sometimes work fine, other times just make no sense at all.
It's cheap, looks cheap, and signals laziness. This is the sentiment I'm getting even from non-technical people on Facebook these days.
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If taste is involved, it's even worse vibes. I mean, an AI poster for a cell phone repair shop is whatever. An AI poster for a clothing store? I don't trust their fashion. This could be the deciding factor on if I get Filipino or Chinese (especially cause the food on the menu in the article looks terrible)...
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You find that most higher-class restaurants have a one-page menu, with a soup of the day, 4-7 dishes, and maybe a dessert, with the menu being written once a day and clear about what you get.
There's some hot take incoming about highly processed foods, but the reality is that's still designed and made by humans, for humans, and so passes all those initial hurdles like "is this poison or a trap?"
An image model doesn't even have that grounding.
It’s just plain old false advertising, isn’t it? We already have laws about that.
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One day a tattoo parlor asked her to make a sign. She did. They asked if she had ever thought about getting into tattooing. She hadn't. They gave her an apprenticeship.
After completing her apprenticeship, she's now booked so far into advance that she closed her book to the public.
I think about her all the time now, what with software engineering going the way that it is. What lateral like passion could I transition to, as she did?
A question I ask myself increasingly frequently. Do let us know if you find any answer.
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The difference between scrawl on a chalk board and a glossy menu with photos is not really the visual effect, it's the amount of effort and the virtue signalling - "my food is so amazing I don't need to make more effort than this".
But that applies to AI menus too. "Why are these horrible AI slop photos on your menu?" "Because I'm too focused on food to hand create a perfect American Psycho minimalist menu"
As opposed to what? This is usually a sign of quality. If it’s in chalk it’s because it changes as the restaurant experiments and tries new things.
This restaurant probably has the "tech nephew" who played around with ChatGPT and they thought it looks fresh and new or something, and they probably said "ha and we didn't have to pay anyone!". And while it looks bad to us, for a while it will look "good" and "professional" to a lot of people.
But eventually so many will have this same look that the whiplash will occur, everyone will reject it, and like you said then the differentiation will be the least AI looking.
Sometimes I wonder if this will settle into its own form of kitsch over the years, and whether people will someday try to emulate it (with a wink and a nod).
Every restaurant/bar in my area has that phrase in their AI flyers.
"All slop. All shit."
<click>
...OK, that's not just bad, that's positively disturbing.
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I’m not sure whether I disagree that a menu is a book or whether judging a book by its cover is a bad thing in this instance.
A menu has to list certain allergens, but not all. That would be inconvenient. With pictures however, people with allergies can more efficiently rule out or order dishes based on what they see.
Generated images breaks with this. I’ve seen multiple places not add certain ingredients to their images that would be there in a photo. I think this is irresponsible. You are free to disagree though, but you need a proper argument if you want to convince us.
I find that behavior much more disgusting than the disgusting AI illustrations themselves.
These places are doing their best to compete in a cutthroat environment with often razor-thin margins but you are willing to write them off and actively try to harm them for reaching for a tool to try and meet consumer's ever-increasing expectations?
Just like in the native vs electron debate it's not "Beautiful hand-crafted native app" or "Electron wasteful trash", it's "Electron or nothing".
I don't begrudge people at all for reaching for LLM/AI to help cover over what they are incapable of doing or unable to pay other people for. And while "anyone can take a picture" taking good food photography is difficult.
In their core business they're not going to show an actual picture of the actual product they intend to provide?
In an age where people routinely tweet/Instagram/message pictures of their served meals?
> Electron or nothing
"Nothing" is an open space for someone to provide a better solution so often better in the long term than a bad implementation.
The overwhelming majority of the total uses of Electron apps are going to be the same pile of apps from various megacorps that could fund native apps with change from their couch cushions.
e.g. the sum total of Electron apps I use are Teams (I guess not quite Electron now, but close enough)/Slack/Discord/Android Messages/VS Code.
Emotional blackmailing aside, does the consumer ever expect fake images of the food they purchase in the menu?
An AI generated burger has very little resemblance of what the restaurant is capable of producing.
Most of them are terrible because they no longer exist, have no budget because they’re not making money, or because they’re bad at doing things generally.
But then there’s a set of companies that do fantastically well and are so busy serving customers (or are satisfied with their results) that their website doesn’t matter. In that case, the bad website is an indicator for a good product.
[0] https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=pot+au+feu&iar=images&noai=1
[1] What's the English word for Bildung?
[0] I'm sure I'm not alone here.
[1] I didn't say anything about AI images, did I?
I don't understand what is so wrong with that website. I don't love it, I don't have it either. If you were looking for a business that makes websites and you don't like their website I would understand, but this is not the case here.
Maybe they hired someone to get a website and they were sold this AI slop?
I've seen a lot of SMB in my area get terrible AI slop websites recently. After looking at the footer some "web agency" sold them. They claim to sell "hand crafted, no framework" websites, but it looks super terrible.
And yes, there's a very long history of food places using unrealistic images of someone else's version of the food on the menus. That doesn't mean that it's okay to now use LLM versions of the food, because I never thought it was okay to use those stylised photos either.
It's different in kind to a "my Big Mac is more squashed than the advert on TV" type situation.
You can get damn close in Japan. I've even had situations where the food looks _better_ than the photos.
And like you said, if they are that careless and unadept at one thing, how are they going to work the intricacies of an espresso machine and food safety standards? Not that an espresso machine is that hard to operate, but surely it's more difficult than maintaining the aspect ratio of a photo. You don't even need to know the term "aspect ratio" to get it right.
But I also have to admit that my expectations seem to be very off on this specific issue. My wife is quite intelligent (actual, literal genius) and even quite artsy, and yet I had to teach her how to not resize photos incorrectly, both for aspect ratio and quality by resizing too large. It's seems like such an easy thing to see and figure out to me. This must be how my 10 year old sees my chess play.
I think people complaining about AI art at businesses are making an aesthetic argument and then laundering it into ones with more heft. I mostly agree with the aesthetic argument, but it’s only that, not some wider indictment.
When I can easily (without lots of effort/resources) check the quality of something, I prefer not to be that influenced by this type of "bad signals". Think of buying a coffee or trying a sandwich place. When I make a big investment, like a laptop or a TV, yes then it is a different story.
The degree to which the menu is part of "the experience around that" is exactly the debate here; you can't just claim it as axiomatic.
>AI-generated art signals that you didn't put effort in,
or it signals you spend your time sourcing the best beans, understanding the climate of the various bean producing regions, reading trade news for the coffee industry, ...
>"At least you tried" is not a high standard, but it's the one that AI art fails.
Again, says you
If you need medical treatment, will you go to a doctor operating out of an office, or a doctor operating out of their own garage? Theoretically, either one could be good or bad at medicine, but in practice, professionalism is a useful signal.
An ugly AI-generated menu shows a naive disregard for the actual experience of your customers. This attitude will bleed into the food quality.
> Every dollar spent on design is a dollar that is not going to the quality of my food.
Then throw something together in MS Word. That's free. It's not bad for something to be low-effort; it just needs to be commensurately simple.
I hear more and more stories about people running into obviously AI-generated stuff whether it's menus, posters, news articles, music, or videos and they find it a turn-off. So if a small business is wanting to use AI, it's probably best to limit it to internal workflows, and not have it be too apparent in your public facing appearance.
Is it a garage that has the same hygiene standards and medical equipment as an office? Your metaphor kinda falls apart here, because those are not orthogonal to the medical service outcomes, the way that a menu is orthogonal to the food quality.
>No, it's entirely rational to judge a service based on external signals.
This is the crux of why we disagree: you think of a restaurant as a seller of a service and you count things like "menu" as part of that service. Thats fine if you want status signaling from your restaurant. I see a restaurant as a purveyor of a good: the food that is produced, and the menu is orthogonal to that. You and I are optimizing for different things.
"Experience" versus food.
Maybe! A garage can be cleaned very thoroughly, especially if you renovate with that in mind. I wouldn't bet on it, though. A good doctor probably could operate out of a garage, but they wouldn't. And a good restaurateur would take time to think about their menu.
These signals select for people with domain knowledge and experience. Status has nothing to do with it. Even the cheapest street food will be evaluated against its competition based on external signals, and so better, more experienced vendors will tend to know how to present themselves well.
All else being equal, would you rather eat a hot dog from a cart with a nice sign, or from a guy sitting on the sidewalk who sharpied "Hotdog $3" on a piece of cardboard?
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When you're buying a pig in a poke (which is always the case when you're a first-time customer), this is a positive signal.
The gleeful spite and disdain for building community norms isn't an accident, it's an attitude they want to normalize.
A smoldering sense of inadequacy compels use of the adequacy machine
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Eventually there will be no way to tell between AI slop or not.
I’m not sure how your bridging this into psychoanalysis
I saw this menu online the other day, and it's not even discernable from the photo what the food products are; it even sets off trypophobia:
But people are still ordering it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1uv0xcq/...
Besides it being so general a question to really be useless as anything but an insinuation IMO, which is why I'm trying to tease that insinuation out. E.g. are people who use Apple left-handed? Are they gay? The answer is "yes, some of them, of course, but also many aren't... why are you asking?"
There is no thing as "just a question, nothing in mind really". That does not exist. The mind that can ask a question cannot arrive at it in a vacuum.
The real reason for Electron apps being a thing is that there is very little competition where they are used. If chatting applications could properly communicate with each other based on international standards instead of being silos, nobody in their right mind would use the trash clients that Slack and Whatsapp produce, for instance.
I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well.
For the fliers I'm talking about here (think a hardware store promoting their summer sale) I don't think the impact on the local poster design community is meaningful.
And yet... the resulting posters put me off. I'm trying to figure out why that is. I think the best explanation I have is the lack of intention behind them - knowing that none of the visual details - the illustrations, the typographic flair - had anyone thinking about them while they were constructed.
I think that's exactly it, and it's not really hard to articulate. You are simply noticing the lack of effort, lack of care, and lack of craftsmanship that is inherent in AI-produced slop. This isn't mysticism and it doesn't take a sixth sense to detect. When someone puts no effort into creating something, that lack of effort carries through the entire work, and is (or should be) obvious and easy to spot.
Ask a schoolteacher. They can spot when someone half-asses a term paper, and, at least I hope, they can spot AI slop term papers.
I also agree with
> I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well.
But I also really hate these menus, I see them all the time as well. I think that my conclusion is slightly different than yours: in my opinion, just not a lot of people have taste. That's sort of like, true by the definition of taste, but what I mean is something more specific: it's not because of AI that I dislike these signs. It's because of what you said above:
> producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.
While it looks like a huge improvement to them, it does not to me. Our tastes differ.
Here's a version of this that doesn't involve AI at all: last night I ate sushi at a place I'd never been before. Their menu was a bit chaotic, and had a bunch of annotations, along with a guide to those annotations. One section had both "2" and "2 pieces" listed under the options, and so I was confused: what was the difference here? Turns out it's basically just a typo, both mean that. Combine that with some spelling mistakes, and yeah, I had a pretty bad impression of the menu. The sushi was fine though, I'd go back. But this wasn't a super low-end place, so the attention to detail being off made me a bit worried before I actually ate the food.
Same problem, same issue, AI is really the only variable here. And it is the natural downside of "democratization" or "helping more people do more things", naturally, there will be a lot more low-quality stuff out there than before. That's not actually inherently a bad thing. But it can feel weird.
There is so little intention in anything (again, even before LLMs) so I don't begrudge places for using LLMs to try and produce similar quality to what larger chains/corps are able to commision.
I see this as similar to things like people wanting "clean ingredients" or "sustainable packaging" or "healthy food" in restaurants/bakeries/etc. They _say_ they want that but they are not at all willing to _pay_ for it. To be clear, I do wish those things were the baseline, but they are not and unfortunately it is near-impossible to compete with other businesses that don't care about those things. At the end of the day consumers see "$15 hamburger" vs "$10 hamburger", the better/fewer ingredients, the better-paid labor, the recyclable packaging, etc simple don't matter. This is _not_ an argument to underpay workers, kill the environment, and fill your hamburgers with sawdust, it's simply a statement on how hard it is to compete when consumers very rarely reward companies for doing things "right" no matter how much lip-service they pay to it.
I've watched a close relative have people say "you should do X thing!" where X is something like "fewer ingredients" or "low calorie" or "healthy"-type things, only to see sales crater after an initial boost. People try it, they feel good about themselves, then they go right back to buying the thing packed with sugar.
There is a wide gulf between "what people say that want" and "how they actually behave". LLMs are currently in a category where people can have visceral reaction and claim "I'd never buy something from a company that does that" but I can tell you right now that won't last. Be anti-bad-design, be anti-bad-code but don't be anti-LLM because that opinion isn't going to age well (and yes, I know _you_ simonw, aren't anti-LLM, I'm speaking generally).
no, it's because the SNR of AI slop is worse than human creations.
hamburger: $4.99
S̵u̸p̸e̷r̷s̶l̵o̷p̵ ̸S̶i̴g̸n̷a̴t̸u̷r̵e̵b̷u̷r̶g̵e̸r̶:̶ ̷$̴4̸.̴9̸9̷(̵b̴a̵s̷e̸ ̵c̴o̸n̵f̷i̶g̶u̵r̶a̵t̴i̴o̸n̴)̴
The amount of data hasn't changed - it's presentation. The noise is real. Presenting just the prompt to patrons may suffice, but dressing it up with an LLM output is mast^C
1: this is not even the second time I've seen someone here mention TTS or legal/literal blindness, so I suppose this actually isn't negligible, not sarcastically
Look at this poster template. You could make it yourself in 10 minutes, with PowerPoint or any of a million other drag & drop poster-makers. https://s3.amazonaws.com/thumbnails.venngage.com/template/1b...
People may think, "oh, it's a bit simple. I guess they're a small business," but so what? If we rule out the option of hiring an actual designer, it's gonna be that or "ew, look at that shitty AI poster."
> 1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster
> OR
> 2. Use AI
You are wrong and trying to make people you disagree with sound stupid. Stop it.
I’ll tell you then that the options I believe in are:
1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster
2. don’t
3. Use AI
And I accept both option 1 and 2.
The quality of generative AI may not be top-notch, but it presents an easy drop-in replacement for one-off tasks that people previously outsourced to platforms like Fiverr (voiceovers, logo design, clip art, copy editing, translation, etc).
My very first gig out of engineer school was updating the website and flyers for some nightclub in Paris. I was terribly paid, badly treated, blamed for everything despite them always giving me the elements at the very last minute, but they did pay someone.
> I expect they are now investing approximately the same about of time iterating in ChatGPT
They are definitely _not_ spending an hour iterating with ChatGPT... I would bet a large amount of money that the overwhelming majority pick one of the n options provided from the very first generation result with no further refinements.
> something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them
Of course they think it's great, or they wouldn't be doing it. That goes for everyone, with anything, ever. And some customers probably think it's great, too. But if you want me as a customer, to whom all those other opinions are completely irrelevant, you'd be better off just putting a turd glazed with boogers. Doesn't matter what it advertises, I'll know a human made this, and look at the product description.
stomps feet in anger "Daddy, I want a squirrel! Get me one of those squirrels! I want a trained squirrel!"
Some of the best food I ate in places that looked like complete design wrecks. And yes now these places use a lot of really badly made ai art.
The food is still delicious.
You keep introducing these silly confounding variables. I wouldn't eat from any hotdog vendor who is sitting on the sidewalk, regardless of their signage. If both had carts, the signage wouldn't affect my decision, particularly because hotdogs are shit in my opinion. As nice sign on a hotdog cart is like putting lipstick on a pig.
> hotdogs are shit in my opinion
Then by all means, substitute the street food of your preference. Unless you disdain street food in general, which would be irrational, unless eating at a specific place is meant for its societal signaling value rather than for its food :)
I suspect this cohort is a lot larger than the cohort that directly, independently identifies "that was made with AI". But that's just, like, my opinion, man--take it with a grain.
If true, this phenomenon is conflating years of increasingly invasive/desperate marketing spends, widespread product enshittification, and AI usage, but is simultaneously a genuine indication of a big segment of people's distaste.
All that is separate from revealed preference--however disliked, both past and AI-generated-present marketing of the SALE SALE SALE BUY NOW OR YOU'RE INADEQUATE variety works on a lot of people. So whether "dislike of AI" translates into meaningful behavior changes is anyone's guess. But I think there is a phenomenon being identified here, whether or not it's just AI or something more nebulous.
Because people are struggling to make ends meet as wealth gets more and more concentrated. It reminds me of that really disgusting joke: why do sheep farmers like to fuck their sheep just at the edge of a cliff? Because they push back.
So yeah, people often make choices they'd rather not make. Doesn't mean anything, just like that sheep doesn't love the farmer and is grinding up against him, it doesn't want to fall of a cliff and die.
And these companies take a few cherry picked snapshots, never show the video, never show the aftermath, and brag about acceptance. Fuck all of that, so much.
People don't want all of humanity to be stolen from by companies who then turn around and sue you if you violate their copyright. That settles all of it, already. All this stuff about quality and economics is irrelevant. We hate people who steal from the little man to enrich the wealthy, always did, always will. Where there is a "we" that isn't just isolated people playing pretend, you will find this as the bedrock, maybe a layer above hating child abuse. And making the "accept child abuse or robber barons" option 10%, 20%, 50000% cheaper doesn't change that in the slightest.
I'll go you one further: the very few ones who do, or don't care, don't matter, because when it comes to ethics and society they already checked out, and can stay checked out. They got old, they lost what they were supposed to hold on to if they ever had it, and that's tragic, but mostly their problem which they want to extend onto the people who don't have it.
