The loss of personality is real. The most heartbreaking ones I've seen are in schools, or anywhere that children are involved.
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 most heartbreaking ones I've seen are in schools, or anywhere that children are involved.
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…
My wife and I just doesn't a weekend at a craft show (she has a hobby writing sci fi books and we go to street fests to sell them). There were at least TWO vendors selling "hand made" paintings that I could tell were AI generated pictures pasted onto a piece of wood and then had a few coats of clear coat slapped on thick to give it a paint brush effect. Also, their banners were AI generated. Disgustingly dishonest.
This helped my nostalgic craving for those pedantic old school HN comments which I seem to see less of nowadays...But frankly as a kid playing in the pool often revolved around pretending to be some kind of sea creature.
The obvious answer is because the old, crudely drawn sign did (and to go deeper, you'd have to ask the janitor who drew it.) Now it's become completely detached from its origin and pointless.
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.
Preschools decorate lists with little pictures on the sides. In most preschools that I’m aware of the person who makes that list makes minimum wage and has 4-8 children to keep alive while she’s making that list.
I'm aware of that, and it becomes extremely obvious in an inherently soulful context such as a preschool.
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.
I think AI pictures have this soulless vibe because they are creations of Frankenstein: many pieces of other pictures stitched together in a sloppy manner. A human-made picture, even a bad one, is made by outlining an idea and the presence if this idea behind a picture is what gives it a soul, figuratively speaking.
Felt the same way back in the Broderbund 'The Print Shop' days. Once my school purchased a copy, all the signs around the school looked nearly identical, just with variations in symbols and fonts. I was a huge computer nerd and that was one of my first times thinking that maybe computers weren't always the best solution.
It felt much the same when posters went from hand-drawn to created by computers. Personality went from handwriting or eccentric, dynamically-created fonts to Comic Sans. To me this feels like the next level.
TBH, most of those menus just looked like pre-AI menus to me...
To me, it feels somewhat anti-social. Going from working with the community on the flyer (assuming, like you said, it was hand drawn by a janitor or teacher or maybe even a student) to working with no one. Why can't we invite the community to work on things like this? If we don't have time, we should make time for it, like a little bit of class time for the students to draw a flyer. Children, schools and community 3rd places like pools are worth it!
I totally agree with you! I love seeing a flyer at my daughter's school that was obviously made by a student. It shows that they care enough about the thing to put real work into promoting it. Heck yes I'll buy a donut from coffee cart so you can go to some camp, fifth graders!
Exactly. In a few short years no one will feel the slop content is unusual - just in time for thr next jarring iteration to come along. It's not good or bad. It just is. Time marches on.
It's the corporatization of all aspects of life. It's so bad of a problem that many people voluntarily adopt the style of neutered corporate branding in even their own things. Listen to how people talk: we used to laugh and call people names when they used the word "synergy" in a personal setting and now it's used unironically.
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.
Who are these “everyone”? I suspect that you actually mean “many random social media users”, which only proves that getting negative reactions out of the average social media is trivial; not exactly a groundbreaking discovery.
I'm fascinated by how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising in seemingly just the last six months - presumably because ChatGPT Images and Gemini Nano Banana finally got good enough at outputting text without obvious defects in the typography.
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?
I was talking to my daughter a few weeks ago about a coffee shop that was opening soon and I said that based on the posters in the window it probably wouldn’t be very good. She didn’t really understand how I could draw that conclusion and I explained that you could tell that they had been stretched to fit the available dimensions in a way that clearly distorted the images and text. And that like… if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things.
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.
This is so definitely not true in many many cases. The best pizza shops in NYC for decades have been quaint, basic and often messy spaces. The ones with the nice menus and overdone decor were often subpar and would fail. This also applies to the best chinese food. Opening a business is hard, you might be incredibly passionate about pizza or coffee but not have budget for a designer. When traveling I usually have way better food at the unpretentious local street food spots rather than the michelin star ones that are all about presentation.
> if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things
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.
I read this quote somewhere: How you do something is how you do everything. I go by this principle in my life. Lately, I have been thinking in how many cases will this be not true.
>if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things
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.
> 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.
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.
There is a good chance you will be wrong, but it's not like you will actually check whether or not you were wrong. You are assuming that you are correct, and have already come to the conclusion that the coffee shop is not good. But even if it is good, you will not admit that it is good, because then you will have to admit that you were wrong.
Hopefully, your daughter just politely nodded her head, and did not actually listen to you.
Not just you. There's been a huge pushback in the local music community around this. Concerts listings now prominently feature the name of the poster designer! Humans FTW.
One of the coolest things about seeing a show at the Fillmore is getting the posters they hand out. A number of bands sell, or have their artists, sell show posters (which then become collectible limited editions); it's way less offensive when it's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard than when it's Wizards of the Coast.
Going back over a decade (ETA, actually, wow, over two decades), I used to go to shows, not only to see the bands, but also to make sure I got the poster. This one, made by Tim Gough, escaped me: http://www.oldskull.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/timgough-...
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 perspective on this, as someone skeptical of (but also bullish on) AI, is complex and I haven't completely nailed it down.
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.
I have the opposite impression. For me the quality is the cake; polish is just the icing. Putting out a 5-min of effort output with an AI as your image, is all icing and no cake: it has all the right proportions, layout, etc, but something is very wrong with it.
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.
> 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?
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.
> The posters all look good - much better than their desktop publishing predecessors.
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.
My job did a 'lunch concert'. A violinist and pianist were invited to play during our lunch hour. Great initiative.
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.
Right, and any musicians taking that kind of gig will have professional photos they would happily share that you could just put some text on top of!
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.
>But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds?
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
> how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising
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.
It's always been like this - businesses signal that they have piles of money to burn by burning it on expensive advertising. Before AI, you would have been dubious of an ad that was amateurish/clipart/etc. because it shows they can't be bothered spending money on professional designers. Back in the day, I heard that websites used Flash content for this reason too because it was expensive to produce.
I think it would be better if consumers stopped using burning money as a measure of whether to buy something.
For me it depends on the details. The baseline is as you say, negative, but there's a plumber not too far from me whose logo is AI generated, and I can't say I'd hold it against them because I wouldn't be hiring them for an eye to artistic credibility in the first place.
I definitely roll my eyes whenever i see a poster with that obvious-AI-generated cartoon-people style. or the "edgy rock-and-roll poster" style that seems to be so prevalent. It seems that everyone generating posters is using the same 3 prompts! it's maddening.
It's generally bad vibes because honestly, they're ugly. If you're flat broke, are too many non ugly templates out there. Hiring a local person to do a job like this isn't that expensive, either. All else fails, there's a certain charm in an honest diy poster that AI lacks.
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)...
I get the consumers' ick when I see an AI-generated menu, logo, or sign as much as the next person. Beyond that, there is an argument to be made about the discrepancy between the pictorial depictions of a food item and what you are actually served in real life. I wish something akin to Japan's strict food packaging laws existed for restaurants.
I have a few friends I’d describe as high up in the restaurant industry. They’ll usually be skeptical of a menu with photos unless it’s a mom and pop place that’s been around for decades.
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.
Genuinely asking, why is it considered bad? If it is done right, it will guide the customer better on whether they want something like it. We all see the photos/reviews on google maps before going inside a restaurant.
For food in addition to the false advertising it's just going to be the uncanny valley: there's thousands of years of evolutionary motivation to try and assess if food is safe. Any amount of "wrongness" will put people right off.
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?"
They could have taken pictures of each of the food items and used that as the basis of the images, they would have gotten a much more accurate and less generic result. But then you wouldn't be seeing it on HN.
It's really easy to fix this behavior, as a consumer start throwing fits and refusing food when it comes out not as the picture. Enough people do it and those menus will change.
My first thought was that the simplified illustrations of the dishes actually make for quickly finding something, or familiarizing yourself with new foods.
Writing in signs and menus in chalk has been a signal for a high quality restaurant for as long as I can remember. With photos of the food, and/or ring bound menus being the worst.
I knew someone that actually got a degree in like letterprinting with a minor in menu design. She went from town-to-town creating these beautiful chalk menu designs and lived a pretty modest life.
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?
Photos of the food, at least in the US, started with "immigrant" restaurants. When Thai/Vietnamese/Chinese restaurants started opening up in areas without high concentrations of those people, they'd put photos in the menu so you could see what you were getting since that wouldn't be clear from the names or descriptions in the menu. A lot of these restaurants were cheap, which is why I think you associate it with low-quality restaurants.
Indeed. It seems the parent comment has accidentally made exactly the opposite point than they intended.
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"
Yeah, there’s a great bar I sometimes go to where the taplist is a chalkboard because of their ~20 taps they’re typically changing at least one per day to a new keg.
looks like every kebab shop menu near me. All offerings crudely cut/pasted/mashed together. 5 near me literally have the same menu with different prices and a colour theme to match their (usually terrible, 3-D font effect from 90's era Corel Draw) Logo.
And they were like that BEFORE GenAI got popular!
This brought back fond memories of my favorite kebab cart in college. Looked back at their cart on Google Maps and some of the menu items are just the same image stretched differently.
GPT-Image has that horrible deep-fried look to it. Can't draw anything without looking like it's got grit thrown over the whole image. Nano Banana is much, much better here, it's often hard to tell if it's fake.
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.
There’s a lot of times I see people reaching for AI instead of taking a photograph, this is super egregious when it’s meant as a reference, because the AI generated image won’t necessarily look like the real thing. I’ve seen it used in reference documents about animal management/veterinary reference meant for farmers, and the generated cows, horses and so on are just worse than the original version that was done with photos, they may look more “clean”, but farm life isn’t meant to be clean and it also lost the veterinarian that was shown in the shots manipulating the animal and properly indicating with hands where to pay attention in the animal.
Low effort products will be used by low effort companies. In the case of restaurants, this might not necessarily be bad - I’ve been to amazing taco/burrito shops w abysmal menus. But if I went to a “high end” place with an AI menu and instagram decor - bad, bad sign.
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.
Anthropic has been running the exact same video ad in my youtube feed for months showing a guy making the tackiest "impossible" coffee table hanging from chains that I wouldn't even bother clicking on if it were a thumbnail from a favorite woodworker. I'd think if ChatGPT were such a great creative tool they could use it to create more than one ad....
> But if I went to a “high end” place with an AI menu and instagram decor - bad, bad sign.
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).
In thirty years, cool kids will be passing around memory crystals with a bootleg 2026 llm on it, so they can generate awesome retro AI images from back when AI still had soul.
I think 5 years ago, we'd just have thought this was a "badly designed menu" and moved on, but now AI has taught us to feel a deep sense of disappointment with it's particular blend of poor personality-less design.
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.
The AI overreaction is people extrapolating change forward in a linear fashion, not unlike the nightly news scarily reporting about some "trend" sweeping the nation (rainbow parties, polygamy, whatever), playing on people's fear that inevitably it is going to consume society.
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.
I live in Brazil, and on our delivery apps (like iFood), AI photos have become a plague. It's so bad seeing pictures with that distinct GPT look. You just don't know what your rice and beans will look like.
In the US, some of those apps were generating gross nonsense like showing an image of a pizza with a sweet pie filling (because the menu said “pizza pie”).
I don’t get how AI images like this don’t open them up to false advertising lawsuits
Clocked this a while ago, crazy how the smell of the same model they're using is so distinct that entire areas of town are starting to look homogenous.
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.
But consider how, in just a short few years, tools will have changed so much that even achieving this specific look will not even be possible (everything is in the cloud and normal users can’t even run them locally)
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
My personal opinion is that these days most people simply wouldn’t be able to tell that the photos are AI generated, and even if they could, they wouldn’t care or have any strong thoughts about it. I don’t think my parents or any adults aged 50+ in my family have spent any time at all playing around with AI image generation tools or comparing AI-generated images to non-AI-generated images to be able to have any opinions about these things.
So until more people frequenting restaurants care it’s a relatively low risk and low cost way to update your menu.
I always feel my hunger disappearing when I see ai generated images of food. I lose all appetite. The pictures never look appetizing. Sometimes I even feel like it is illegal to look at them, as if I look at something so unnatural my body warns me to look away.
I've seen some extremely unnatural ones, like börek that looks overstuffed or Afghan Kabuli Palau with what looked like chocolate squares instead of meat chunks! It feels like looking at sci-fi horror.
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!!
That's the definition of judging a book by its cover. Maybe they don't care about spending money on design and just want to focus on the food they serve, you'll never know. I would also probably be less inclined to enter a restaurant if I saw generated images advertising the food as opposed to real ones. But I would never ever dare put a one star review without even having been a customer there in the first place. I would remove 2 stars at most from a 5 stars review, if the food and service was impeccable but they ruined the settings with AI.
> That's the definition of judging a book by its cover.
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.
Just so I have this clear, you rate a restaurant badly based on the pictures of the food and not the taste/flavor/etc?
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.
> 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".
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.
I've come around to the other side of this in a way. I used to think "wow they don't care at all" the same way I previously looked at menus clearly made in MS Word: The place will probably be cheap and they don't care about having fancy menu design.
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.
Possibly, but I think it’s a bit more intuitive than that. It’s basically just like companies with terrible websites:
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.
These are absolutely consuming Taipei over the last few months. This spring I saw an AI-generated menu for the first time, and then it was like overnight that now on basically every street there's at least one restaurant that has an AI menu, sign, or window dressing. It looks awful and I can't understand how anyone thinks it's a good idea. Noodles give me skin-crawling ants feeling. Chopsticks pick up tofu without pinching it, as if it's drawn magnetically. Spoons dip sauce from bowls that are smaller than the spoon.
AI menus and signage are quickly becoming the dog whistle for "cheap". It's telling you what kind of quality and service you should expect in the rest of their product or service. Pretty soon people will catch on, and start avoiding these places. Once that happens, generative AI image models will be hard-pressed to drop the association. It's like walking into a dollar store -- everything can be made cheaply, so it doesn't matter if something there is actually of any value.
We always expect what was promised to be different than what was delivered to some degree, but I'm not sure restaurants have fully weighed the expectations-vs-reality backlash this may cause... uncannily-wrong details aside for a sec, the AI pics always set michelin-level presentation expectations. The final promise-vs-plate pics in this post were pretty dramatic.
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 think the problem will tend to be more mundane. Picture shows nine chicken tenders, but you get three. You're going to wonder where your other six chicken tenders are.
Outside of cheap takeout places, I neither need nor want to see pictures of food on menus, because I can read the menu and decide for myself whether I want to try something based off the description. I'd rather a blown out flash photo of a plate of noodles than a generated image though.
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).
I don’t understand why people use this for _illustrated menus_, of all things. The uncanny valley is particularly offputting in the context of _food_, and ai-generated food images often look very wrong.
Because it’s cheaper, whether they got it through fiverr, did it themselves, or might even think it looks good? I don’t think a place that signs off on plating its dishes that way is thinking deeply about these kinds of things.
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.
My daughter's primary teacher last year was leading an English language lesson where the main task was to write a poem about a hot air balloon. Instead of finding existing poems about hot air balloons, of which there must be a lot even if they're not great quality, she pulled up ChatGPT on the digital whiteboard, wrote "Write me a poem about a hot air balloon" and said "do that". Sometimes people just don't care. (The teacher was "let go" soon after that, thankfully).
I'm sure I'm in a bubble to some degree, but around me it feels like the negative reaction to anything GenAI isn't restricted to tech circles (though I live in a fairly tech-y town) and crosses the generations except for the oldest.
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
I think its interesting how sensitive some people are to AI generated everything and then there's a group of people who just straight up don't care. No real middle ground.
I need photos in menu. I don't want surprises, I want to choose what I will eat, which is often extremely difficult when you only see cryptic names of dishes, maybe a list of ingredients too, if you're especially lucky.
Ask the waiter and have an actual conversation with a human, or at least do an image search[0], either way you'll learn something and become a more experienced and cultured[1] human being. And you'll have a more truthful expectation than an AI image will give you.
We've seen several new restaurants crop up on a busy restaurant street near us, and they all have AI generated logos and food images. All are bad, some are comically bad, some are just false advertising.
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.
Yeah... The "Authentic Indian" curry house in my town replaced everything with AI. So the food really doesn't look like whatever they are serving. This was an issue always with plastic / pro photographed food, but now it costs nothing and it immediately jumps out as definitely not authentic.
Small businesses tend to be very clumsy with stuff like this. Here in Berlin it's very common for small restaurants and food places to have half broken websites with some pdf as their menu. Their online marketing is generally pretty poor. Some of the more clever places at least stay a bit on top of their Google Maps presence.
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.
There are a lot of these on websites too. There was a design that was pretty good back in the day, but lately I've been getting quite a few requests to change it to the trendy Linear-style AI design. As more sites use AI-generated images, I think some people have come to see that as the trend
If 1000's of years from now aliens discovers these menus while excavating buried human cities they will get confused about what evolutionary dissonance was going on looking at the phenotypical structure of creatures in hand drawn paintings juxtaposed with AI drawn menus. "Did these humans who drew these live in different cut off worlds that these same animals evolved to look so different from each other?", "Did they engage in active genetic engineering instead(because they lived only for a few 1000 years in organized societies)?" they would hypothesize and get confused.
Future alien confusion is all that Gen-AI pictures add. There is no value to them that is remotely redeeming/useful to us today.
You might enjoy “Motel of the Mysteries” then, a large format illustrated paperback that I grew up with, which showed some hilarious conclusions about 1980s ‘culture’ by some future-millennia archaeologists. They conclude for instance that the TV box is an object of worship because all the architecture in the motel is designed around or points toward it!
I’m ambivalent towards AI generated poster or other business design. It might leave a bad taste in my mouth but it’s whatever. While I’m against it, I can understand why for many businesses it’s an easy and convenient choice.
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??
Anti-AI derangement syndrome is real. Yes it’s not a great looking menu design, but most people (over in Europe at least) have no idea about phillipino food, so some idea what sisig or adobo is great. Anger over restaurant owner having access and capability to this insanely powerful tool is just so mean.
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?
Recently I was shopping for curtains. Even though the shop I found has great reviews and a physical showroom with a real person, I took my business elsewhere when the web looks like this: https://en.vorhangbox.ch/curtain-home-consultation/ .
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 how did the website of the place you moved to looks like?
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.
IDK, the menu is not that bad for a person that is outside the context and sees both menus for the first time. The photo is also not that bad -- of course it would be better to use real photos, I've no idea why they aren't doing this (probably reprinting menus is not a trivial problem), but it kind of gives some hints about the dish. As someone who doesn't have a clue, the new menu gives me some information that the old menu didn't.
Restaurants used to have stock images everywhere from menus, to flyers, and posters. I don't remember much talk about it to the extent we have with AI generated images. I prefer to judge restaurants on the quality and taste of food, unless they're charging me a fine-dining rate for it.
Google maps needs a tool to create menu from best user submitted pics. Still use AI to clean up lighting, masking, layout etc, but there's enough data to cover most popular dishes. Feels like all the REAL useful data / pieces are there to solve the problem.
I think if you showed these before/after menus to people from 5 years ago, most would tell you it’s a massive improvement.
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!”
i have seen all kinds of menu in my limited time. seeing the example, i would not critique on the choice of tool to "commission" the task for the menu. it would rather comment on the amount of f*cks the restaurant owner gave to getting one done.
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.
Somehow in the Netherlands it seems we have mostly managed to escape this. But it's just because people didn't really put any decoration on their menus before, and no decoration is still cheaper than shit AI decorations.
>AI makes something seem very convenient so small business do it because they are resource constrained >It's either not as convenient as it seems or has other undesirable side effects >Repeat
We have RUINED the food industry. It started with gig-work delivery. Restaurants will never recover from GrubHub and ghost kitchens. Food quality and service died years ago.
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.
Everything looks brown, it's crammed together, those not-photos make it feel really cramped in the third column, it looks like every other AI-generated menu and it's lost the clarity the old menu had.
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.
I feel like we read different articles, because without context, the pictured dish looked like overcooked pork chops served next to a type of carbonara tagliatelle topped with a fried egg & chives. I can't imagine anyone has ever set out to make spamsilog and ended up with the generated dish.
It's different in kind to a "my Big Mac is more squashed than the advert on TV" type situation.
It'd be one thing if it was just the problem of a generic AI slop graphic design that all looks the same, the problem is when it generates pictures of food that literally looks disgusting. I've seen some of these posted online where the food literally looks like it's infected (fries with weird black splotches), or the jalapeños look like tires, and it all triggers trypophobia.
I buy rice from an online store that carries speciality Japanese varieties. The rice is very good.
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.
Honestly pictures in restaurant menus have been pretty bad long before AI. I don't understand how it can be accepted to show a picture that looks nothing like the served food.
It doesn't seem to be as much a trend in the UK - fast food, takeaways etc have some leaking in of AI - but when I went to Korea I was blown away by how many restaurants had these AI style menus.
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.
> The worst part is that I frequently work with small businesses in Austin and know that this is from a place of complete ignorance rather than feeling a sense of ownership in art/design they did not do.
> 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.
Why not just tell their staff their menu makes their food look disgusting and they should use the old one? No real financial loss and it’s nice to help a small business. Owner might not know better or has slop reels telling them to do this
Ironic that this would be physical spam and the complaint is AI.
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.
I don’t understand this modern trend where people will put pictures of someone’s menu up, roast them, fall all over themselves talking about how over the food and still hit publish. What is the fucking point?
There is this new thing where people love to show off their sophistication that they can "spot AI". Every time they see an a Claudeism, every time they see an emdash, they talk about how they feel sick to their stomach and are ready to boycott the business that may or may not be guilty of the high crime of using a computer tool.
Yeah, this thought is lame. It's not so bad in other areas, but in food, I would really like to see REAL pictures of what I'm about to order. I mean, "fake" or deceitful pictures always existed, but at least there were real ingredients and so on. I will NEVER boycott some family restaurant because the menu is AI generated, but it is tasteless and I prefer not to see it.
The loss of personality is real. The most heartbreaking ones I've seen are in schools, or anywhere that children are involved.
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.
The reason is that AI art is now commodified.
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 most heartbreaking ones I've seen are in schools, or anywhere that children are involved.
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…
My wife and I just doesn't a weekend at a craft show (she has a hobby writing sci fi books and we go to street fests to sell them). There were at least TWO vendors selling "hand made" paintings that I could tell were AI generated pictures pasted onto a piece of wood and then had a few coats of clear coat slapped on thick to give it a paint brush effect. Also, their banners were AI generated. Disgustingly dishonest.
Also why do they have sea life in it at all, surely that's not something that's meant to be in the pool.
This helped my nostalgic craving for those pedantic old school HN comments which I seem to see less of nowadays...But frankly as a kid playing in the pool often revolved around pretending to be some kind of sea creature.
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The obvious answer is because the old, crudely drawn sign did (and to go deeper, you'd have to ask the janitor who drew it.) Now it's become completely detached from its origin and pointless.
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.
As someone who laps in a pool with fish in it occasionally. It could be true. (google Sydney ocean pools to see what I'm talking about)
Preschools decorate lists with little pictures on the sides. In most preschools that I’m aware of the person who makes that list makes minimum wage and has 4-8 children to keep alive while she’s making that list.
This is such a weird thing to get worked up over.
Because the AI one are soul-less, and the badly drawn ones are not, simple as that.
I'm aware of that, and it becomes extremely obvious in an inherently soulful context such as a preschool.
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.
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I think AI pictures have this soulless vibe because they are creations of Frankenstein: many pieces of other pictures stitched together in a sloppy manner. A human-made picture, even a bad one, is made by outlining an idea and the presence if this idea behind a picture is what gives it a soul, figuratively speaking.
Felt the same way back in the Broderbund 'The Print Shop' days. Once my school purchased a copy, all the signs around the school looked nearly identical, just with variations in symbols and fonts. I was a huge computer nerd and that was one of my first times thinking that maybe computers weren't always the best solution.
It felt much the same when posters went from hand-drawn to created by computers. Personality went from handwriting or eccentric, dynamically-created fonts to Comic Sans. To me this feels like the next level.
TBH, most of those menus just looked like pre-AI menus to me...
To me, it feels somewhat anti-social. Going from working with the community on the flyer (assuming, like you said, it was hand drawn by a janitor or teacher or maybe even a student) to working with no one. Why can't we invite the community to work on things like this? If we don't have time, we should make time for it, like a little bit of class time for the students to draw a flyer. Children, schools and community 3rd places like pools are worth it!
I totally agree with you! I love seeing a flyer at my daughter's school that was obviously made by a student. It shows that they care enough about the thing to put real work into promoting it. Heck yes I'll buy a donut from coffee cart so you can go to some camp, fifth graders!
I can only hope the novelty quickly wears off for everyone and they too realize there's no value in such filler "art".
> The loss of personality is real.
Is this... irony?
Back in the days, you made the title with WordArt and then add clipart images below
Yes, AI art is the 2026 equivalent of clip and stock art, and I don't know why so many people are threatened by that.
Exactly. In a few short years no one will feel the slop content is unusual - just in time for thr next jarring iteration to come along. It's not good or bad. It just is. Time marches on.
It's the corporatization of all aspects of life. It's so bad of a problem that many people voluntarily adopt the style of neutered corporate branding in even their own things. Listen to how people talk: we used to laugh and call people names when they used the word "synergy" in a personal setting and now it's used unironically.
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.
If you dislike it you could speak to whoever did it and tell them "it's ok to use AI for this, just don't settle for your first draft!"
Preferring badly handled-drawn art to AI slop does not mean “use better AI slop.”
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People have posted prolific artists, called it AI, and had everyone hating them until the big reveal. So to be frank, it probably is in your head.
Who are these “everyone”? I suspect that you actually mean “many random social media users”, which only proves that getting negative reactions out of the average social media is trivial; not exactly a groundbreaking discovery.
Art has never been about the objective quality of the work
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I'm fascinated by how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising in seemingly just the last six months - presumably because ChatGPT Images and Gemini Nano Banana finally got good enough at outputting text without obvious defects in the typography.
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?
I was talking to my daughter a few weeks ago about a coffee shop that was opening soon and I said that based on the posters in the window it probably wouldn’t be very good. She didn’t really understand how I could draw that conclusion and I explained that you could tell that they had been stretched to fit the available dimensions in a way that clearly distorted the images and text. And that like… if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things.
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.
This is so definitely not true in many many cases. The best pizza shops in NYC for decades have been quaint, basic and often messy spaces. The ones with the nice menus and overdone decor were often subpar and would fail. This also applies to the best chinese food. Opening a business is hard, you might be incredibly passionate about pizza or coffee but not have budget for a designer. When traveling I usually have way better food at the unpretentious local street food spots rather than the michelin star ones that are all about presentation.
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> if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things
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.
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I read this quote somewhere: How you do something is how you do everything. I go by this principle in my life. Lately, I have been thinking in how many cases will this be not true.
>if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things
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.
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> 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.
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.
There is a good chance you will be wrong, but it's not like you will actually check whether or not you were wrong. You are assuming that you are correct, and have already come to the conclusion that the coffee shop is not good. But even if it is good, you will not admit that it is good, because then you will have to admit that you were wrong.
Hopefully, your daughter just politely nodded her head, and did not actually listen to you.
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Not just you. There's been a huge pushback in the local music community around this. Concerts listings now prominently feature the name of the poster designer! Humans FTW.
One of the coolest things about seeing a show at the Fillmore is getting the posters they hand out. A number of bands sell, or have their artists, sell show posters (which then become collectible limited editions); it's way less offensive when it's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard than when it's Wizards of the Coast.
Going back over a decade (ETA, actually, wow, over two decades), I used to go to shows, not only to see the bands, but also to make sure I got the poster. This one, made by Tim Gough, escaped me: http://www.oldskull.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/timgough-...
https://xkcd.com/993/
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.
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Finally! We need more of this. It did happen sometimes in the past, but not nearly as often as it should.
My perspective on this, as someone skeptical of (but also bullish on) AI, is complex and I haven't completely nailed it down.
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.
I have the opposite impression. For me the quality is the cake; polish is just the icing. Putting out a 5-min of effort output with an AI as your image, is all icing and no cake: it has all the right proportions, layout, etc, but something is very wrong with it.
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.
> 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?
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.
A high degree of polish was tangible evidence that someone in the organization gave a shit about their work.
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> The posters all look good - much better than their desktop publishing predecessors.
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.
Thanks I’ll use this in my prompt to make a better advertisements
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My job did a 'lunch concert'. A violinist and pianist were invited to play during our lunch hour. Great initiative.
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.
Right, and any musicians taking that kind of gig will have professional photos they would happily share that you could just put some text on top of!
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.
>But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds?
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
How many of the people who answer polls like that also have the ability to look at a poster and instantly clock that it was AI-generated?
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> how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising
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.
I don't think it's a corner cutting thing though.
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.
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"You can't shrink your way to growth"
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> The posters all look good
Maybe I’m misunderstanding but I haven’t seen many that I’d say look “good”. Especially food related ones.
It's always been like this - businesses signal that they have piles of money to burn by burning it on expensive advertising. Before AI, you would have been dubious of an ad that was amateurish/clipart/etc. because it shows they can't be bothered spending money on professional designers. Back in the day, I heard that websites used Flash content for this reason too because it was expensive to produce.
I think it would be better if consumers stopped using burning money as a measure of whether to buy something.
For me it depends on the details. The baseline is as you say, negative, but there's a plumber not too far from me whose logo is AI generated, and I can't say I'd hold it against them because I wouldn't be hiring them for an eye to artistic credibility in the first place.
Is he just down the street from Carl's Draperies?
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/terminator/images/e/e9/Tdf...
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If they're skimping on their posters, what else are they skimping on?
It's cheap, looks cheap, and signals laziness. This is the sentiment I'm getting even from non-technical people on Facebook these days.
I definitely roll my eyes whenever i see a poster with that obvious-AI-generated cartoon-people style. or the "edgy rock-and-roll poster" style that seems to be so prevalent. It seems that everyone generating posters is using the same 3 prompts! it's maddening.
distopian nature of AI generic soulless songs as background music in supermarkets is what got me. This has to stop.
It's generally bad vibes because honestly, they're ugly. If you're flat broke, are too many non ugly templates out there. Hiring a local person to do a job like this isn't that expensive, either. All else fails, there's a certain charm in an honest diy poster that AI lacks.
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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I get the consumers' ick when I see an AI-generated menu, logo, or sign as much as the next person. Beyond that, there is an argument to be made about the discrepancy between the pictorial depictions of a food item and what you are actually served in real life. I wish something akin to Japan's strict food packaging laws existed for restaurants.
I have a few friends I’d describe as high up in the restaurant industry. They’ll usually be skeptical of a menu with photos unless it’s a mom and pop place that’s been around for decades.
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.
Gordon Ramsay in many of his kitchen nightmare episodes says it's always a bad sign whenever a restaurant has photos on their menu.
Genuinely asking, why is it considered bad? If it is done right, it will guide the customer better on whether they want something like it. We all see the photos/reviews on google maps before going inside a restaurant.
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For food in addition to the false advertising it's just going to be the uncanny valley: there's thousands of years of evolutionary motivation to try and assess if food is safe. Any amount of "wrongness" will put people right off.
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.
They could have taken pictures of each of the food items and used that as the basis of the images, they would have gotten a much more accurate and less generic result. But then you wouldn't be seeing it on HN.
It's really easy to fix this behavior, as a consumer start throwing fits and refusing food when it comes out not as the picture. Enough people do it and those menus will change.
I wish something akin to Japan's strict food packaging laws existed for restaurants.
It’s just plain old false advertising, isn’t it? We already have laws about that.
My first thought was that the simplified illustrations of the dishes actually make for quickly finding something, or familiarizing yourself with new foods.
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I do think that AI signage/advertising is the new signifier of low-effort, low-skill output and that is how it will be perceived by clientele.
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.
Writing in signs and menus in chalk has been a signal for a high quality restaurant for as long as I can remember. With photos of the food, and/or ring bound menus being the worst.
I knew someone that actually got a degree in like letterprinting with a minor in menu design. She went from town-to-town creating these beautiful chalk menu designs and lived a pretty modest life.
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?
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Photos of the food, at least in the US, started with "immigrant" restaurants. When Thai/Vietnamese/Chinese restaurants started opening up in areas without high concentrations of those people, they'd put photos in the menu so you could see what you were getting since that wouldn't be clear from the names or descriptions in the menu. A lot of these restaurants were cheap, which is why I think you associate it with low-quality restaurants.
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Chalk writing robot/printer in the making ...
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I did say "scrawl",
Indeed. It seems the parent comment has accidentally made exactly the opposite point than they intended.
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"
> Similar to someone just scrawling a sandwich board sign in chalk
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.
Yeah, there’s a great bar I sometimes go to where the taplist is a chalkboard because of their ~20 taps they’re typically changing at least one per day to a new keg.
Escaping AI slop will become a privilege for the wealthy.
Well at least the peas weren't upside down...
https://preview.redd.it/the-peas-are-upside-down-v0-5pwo713b...
looks like every kebab shop menu near me. All offerings crudely cut/pasted/mashed together. 5 near me literally have the same menu with different prices and a colour theme to match their (usually terrible, 3-D font effect from 90's era Corel Draw) Logo. And they were like that BEFORE GenAI got popular!
This brought back fond memories of my favorite kebab cart in college. Looked back at their cart on Google Maps and some of the menu items are just the same image stretched differently.
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This is unironically soulful though.
This is incredibly good stuff.
M.C. Escher opens a restaurant.
"Yes sir, your table is upstairs, just go up via the basement."
I don't think that's AI. It looks more like crappy photoshop.
It's been floating around the Internet since at least 2019. It's classic, soulful bad editing.
Not even photoshop. Literal cut and paste of physical photos :D
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GPT-Image has that horrible deep-fried look to it. Can't draw anything without looking like it's got grit thrown over the whole image. Nano Banana is much, much better here, it's often hard to tell if it's fake.
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.
There’s a lot of times I see people reaching for AI instead of taking a photograph, this is super egregious when it’s meant as a reference, because the AI generated image won’t necessarily look like the real thing. I’ve seen it used in reference documents about animal management/veterinary reference meant for farmers, and the generated cows, horses and so on are just worse than the original version that was done with photos, they may look more “clean”, but farm life isn’t meant to be clean and it also lost the veterinarian that was shown in the shots manipulating the animal and properly indicating with hands where to pay attention in the animal.
Low effort products will be used by low effort companies. In the case of restaurants, this might not necessarily be bad - I’ve been to amazing taco/burrito shops w abysmal menus. But if I went to a “high end” place with an AI menu and instagram decor - bad, bad sign.
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.
Anthropic has been running the exact same video ad in my youtube feed for months showing a guy making the tackiest "impossible" coffee table hanging from chains that I wouldn't even bother clicking on if it were a thumbnail from a favorite woodworker. I'd think if ChatGPT were such a great creative tool they could use it to create more than one ad....
Are you implying that Anthropic is using ChatGPT internally?
> But if I went to a “high end” place with an AI menu and instagram decor - bad, bad sign.
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).
In thirty years, cool kids will be passing around memory crystals with a bootleg 2026 llm on it, so they can generate awesome retro AI images from back when AI still had soul.
I think 5 years ago, we'd just have thought this was a "badly designed menu" and moved on, but now AI has taught us to feel a deep sense of disappointment with it's particular blend of poor personality-less design.
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.
[0] https://cruft.github.io/cruft/
The AI overreaction is people extrapolating change forward in a linear fashion, not unlike the nightly news scarily reporting about some "trend" sweeping the nation (rainbow parties, polygamy, whatever), playing on people's fear that inevitably it is going to consume society.
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.
I live in Brazil, and on our delivery apps (like iFood), AI photos have become a plague. It's so bad seeing pictures with that distinct GPT look. You just don't know what your rice and beans will look like.
In the US, some of those apps were generating gross nonsense like showing an image of a pizza with a sweet pie filling (because the menu said “pizza pie”).
I don’t get how AI images like this don’t open them up to false advertising lawsuits
This one is really disturbing because I can't tell what the food is even supposed to be without looking at the words, plus trypophobia:
https://imgur.com/a/YvyRjts
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Clocked this a while ago, crazy how the smell of the same model they're using is so distinct that entire areas of town are starting to look homogenous.
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.
But consider how, in just a short few years, tools will have changed so much that even achieving this specific look will not even be possible (everything is in the cloud and normal users can’t even run them locally)
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
No we won't.
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My personal opinion is that these days most people simply wouldn’t be able to tell that the photos are AI generated, and even if they could, they wouldn’t care or have any strong thoughts about it. I don’t think my parents or any adults aged 50+ in my family have spent any time at all playing around with AI image generation tools or comparing AI-generated images to non-AI-generated images to be able to have any opinions about these things.
So until more people frequenting restaurants care it’s a relatively low risk and low cost way to update your menu.
Senior citizens are the most vulnerable
I think the Japanese laws requiring strict truth in food advertising would be a good transplant.
Japanese menus are increasingly full of AI pictures as well.
Now they only need an AI to detect those and start filing lawsuits automatically.
I always feel my hunger disappearing when I see ai generated images of food. I lose all appetite. The pictures never look appetizing. Sometimes I even feel like it is illegal to look at them, as if I look at something so unnatural my body warns me to look away.
I've seen some extremely unnatural ones, like börek that looks overstuffed or Afghan Kabuli Palau with what looked like chocolate squares instead of meat chunks! It feels like looking at sci-fi horror.
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!!
I'm starting to see more and more generated images of food at restaurants where I live, but I'm happy to say that its still somewhat rare.
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.
That's the definition of judging a book by its cover. Maybe they don't care about spending money on design and just want to focus on the food they serve, you'll never know. I would also probably be less inclined to enter a restaurant if I saw generated images advertising the food as opposed to real ones. But I would never ever dare put a one star review without even having been a customer there in the first place. I would remove 2 stars at most from a 5 stars review, if the food and service was impeccable but they ruined the settings with AI.
> That's the definition of judging a book by its cover.
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.
>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.
I find that behavior much more disgusting than the disgusting AI illustrations themselves.
Just so I have this clear, you rate a restaurant badly based on the pictures of the food and not the taste/flavor/etc?
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.
They make and sell food in an age where literally everyone has a high quality camera in their pocket.
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?
He's giving the restaurant feedback that this is not what the customer wants, in the only meaningful way to provide feedback.
> 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.
> 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".
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.
> 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?
Emotional blackmailing aside, does the consumer ever expect fake images of the food they purchase in the menu?
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It may require effort to take a nice photo of a dish, but at least its accurate.
An AI generated burger has very little resemblance of what the restaurant is capable of producing.
Pictures aren’t mandatory. Most restaurants don’t have them.
Yes.
I've come around to the other side of this in a way. I used to think "wow they don't care at all" the same way I previously looked at menus clearly made in MS Word: The place will probably be cheap and they don't care about having fancy menu design.
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.
Perhaps in part Berkson’s paradox in action? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox
Possibly, but I think it’s a bit more intuitive than that. It’s basically just like companies with terrible websites:
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.
These are absolutely consuming Taipei over the last few months. This spring I saw an AI-generated menu for the first time, and then it was like overnight that now on basically every street there's at least one restaurant that has an AI menu, sign, or window dressing. It looks awful and I can't understand how anyone thinks it's a good idea. Noodles give me skin-crawling ants feeling. Chopsticks pick up tofu without pinching it, as if it's drawn magnetically. Spoons dip sauce from bowls that are smaller than the spoon.
AI menus and signage are quickly becoming the dog whistle for "cheap". It's telling you what kind of quality and service you should expect in the rest of their product or service. Pretty soon people will catch on, and start avoiding these places. Once that happens, generative AI image models will be hard-pressed to drop the association. It's like walking into a dollar store -- everything can be made cheaply, so it doesn't matter if something there is actually of any value.
Except sometimes cheap places are great because the food is good and they don't spend money on ambience and other pretentious expenditures.
We always expect what was promised to be different than what was delivered to some degree, but I'm not sure restaurants have fully weighed the expectations-vs-reality backlash this may cause... uncannily-wrong details aside for a sec, the AI pics always set michelin-level presentation expectations. The final promise-vs-plate pics in this post were pretty dramatic.
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.
For now I have the opposite problem. The AI pics look way worse than the food they have, which is unfortunate for mom-and-pop businesses.
I actually had the opposite reaction - the AI image looked grotesque, and the the real food was like "oh damn this looks like good food."
I think the problem will tend to be more mundane. Picture shows nine chicken tenders, but you get three. You're going to wonder where your other six chicken tenders are.
Outside of cheap takeout places, I neither need nor want to see pictures of food on menus, because I can read the menu and decide for myself whether I want to try something based off the description. I'd rather a blown out flash photo of a plate of noodles than a generated image though.
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).
Title could be "Restaurants with ugly AI menu redesigns".....
Thought it was going to be something about website nav bars..
I don’t understand why people use this for _illustrated menus_, of all things. The uncanny valley is particularly offputting in the context of _food_, and ai-generated food images often look very wrong.
Because it’s cheaper, whether they got it through fiverr, did it themselves, or might even think it looks good? I don’t think a place that signs off on plating its dishes that way is thinking deeply about these kinds of things.
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.
My daughter's primary teacher last year was leading an English language lesson where the main task was to write a poem about a hot air balloon. Instead of finding existing poems about hot air balloons, of which there must be a lot even if they're not great quality, she pulled up ChatGPT on the digital whiteboard, wrote "Write me a poem about a hot air balloon" and said "do that". Sometimes people just don't care. (The teacher was "let go" soon after that, thankfully).
I'm sure I'm in a bubble to some degree, but around me it feels like the negative reaction to anything GenAI isn't restricted to tech circles (though I live in a fairly tech-y town) and crosses the generations except for the oldest.
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
What's sad is that that AI could make this better. Good food photography is hard. Here's a low effort pass of the photo that they shared https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a61faba10188191a4991f3042e640c3
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.
could you share the prompt? that looks useful!
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a61fc5f-66e8-83ea-bb87-a37a6a942b... (with the photo from the article as the uploaded image)
I think its interesting how sensitive some people are to AI generated everything and then there's a group of people who just straight up don't care. No real middle ground.
Not caring is the middle ground.
Only if there were a group of people who were angrily repelled by non-AI things.
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Apart from the AI/Not AI, I dislike photos on menus. It can be deceptive once the dishes are on the table or it can completely spoil the surprise.
I need photos in menu. I don't want surprises, I want to choose what I will eat, which is often extremely difficult when you only see cryptic names of dishes, maybe a list of ingredients too, if you're especially lucky.
Ask the waiter and have an actual conversation with a human, or at least do an image search[0], either way you'll learn something and become a more experienced and cultured[1] human being. And you'll have a more truthful expectation than an AI image will give you.
[0] https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=pot+au+feu&iar=images&noai=1
[1] What's the English word for Bildung?
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Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Where I live photos on a menu are mostly used for lower tier restaurants. It's not a good sign.
AI images (or even Stock Images) of food in a menu are false advertising. Full stop.
We've seen several new restaurants crop up on a busy restaurant street near us, and they all have AI generated logos and food images. All are bad, some are comically bad, some are just false advertising.
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.
Yeah... The "Authentic Indian" curry house in my town replaced everything with AI. So the food really doesn't look like whatever they are serving. This was an issue always with plastic / pro photographed food, but now it costs nothing and it immediately jumps out as definitely not authentic.
Small businesses tend to be very clumsy with stuff like this. Here in Berlin it's very common for small restaurants and food places to have half broken websites with some pdf as their menu. Their online marketing is generally pretty poor. Some of the more clever places at least stay a bit on top of their Google Maps presence.
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.
There are a lot of small businesses here whose online presence is a Facebook page last updated 10+ years ago.
There are a lot of these on websites too. There was a design that was pretty good back in the day, but lately I've been getting quite a few requests to change it to the trendy Linear-style AI design. As more sites use AI-generated images, I think some people have come to see that as the trend
Remember "Hey Look, It's Every Bootstrap Website Ever"? http://www.dagusa.com/
Yes, exactly. Bootstrap homogenized layout, and now AI seems to be homogenizing both layout and imagery at the same time.
404 Media had a great video discussing this a week ago (mostly in context of parties/community events and businesses)
https://youtu.be/Pc_uE7JF63k?si=oY0ltoYDqU-KwL4a
If 1000's of years from now aliens discovers these menus while excavating buried human cities they will get confused about what evolutionary dissonance was going on looking at the phenotypical structure of creatures in hand drawn paintings juxtaposed with AI drawn menus. "Did these humans who drew these live in different cut off worlds that these same animals evolved to look so different from each other?", "Did they engage in active genetic engineering instead(because they lived only for a few 1000 years in organized societies)?" they would hypothesize and get confused.
Future alien confusion is all that Gen-AI pictures add. There is no value to them that is remotely redeeming/useful to us today.
You might enjoy “Motel of the Mysteries” then, a large format illustrated paperback that I grew up with, which showed some hilarious conclusions about 1980s ‘culture’ by some future-millennia archaeologists. They conclude for instance that the TV box is an object of worship because all the architecture in the motel is designed around or points toward it!
I do miss tacky, over-styled menus sometimes. Doesn't excuse the fake food pictures though.
Nothing says delicious meal like the liberal application of the AI image piss filter
I’m ambivalent towards AI generated poster or other business design. It might leave a bad taste in my mouth but it’s whatever. While I’m against it, I can understand why for many businesses it’s an easy and convenient choice.
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??
Anti-AI derangement syndrome is real. Yes it’s not a great looking menu design, but most people (over in Europe at least) have no idea about phillipino food, so some idea what sisig or adobo is great. Anger over restaurant owner having access and capability to this insanely powerful tool is just so mean.
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?
Recently I was shopping for curtains. Even though the shop I found has great reviews and a physical showroom with a real person, I took my business elsewhere when the web looks like this: https://en.vorhangbox.ch/curtain-home-consultation/ .
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 how did the website of the place you moved to looks like?
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.
The creepy ai slop woman?
> Why would you do this to your business?
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.
Many small businesses have websites made by a nephew or similar - and I’d expect lots of them love using AI now.
IDK, the menu is not that bad for a person that is outside the context and sees both menus for the first time. The photo is also not that bad -- of course it would be better to use real photos, I've no idea why they aren't doing this (probably reprinting menus is not a trivial problem), but it kind of gives some hints about the dish. As someone who doesn't have a clue, the new menu gives me some information that the old menu didn't.
Restaurants used to have stock images everywhere from menus, to flyers, and posters. I don't remember much talk about it to the extent we have with AI generated images. I prefer to judge restaurants on the quality and taste of food, unless they're charging me a fine-dining rate for it.
I've always assumed that pictures on the menu or in the window is an indicator of low quality food.
Google maps needs a tool to create menu from best user submitted pics. Still use AI to clean up lighting, masking, layout etc, but there's enough data to cover most popular dishes. Feels like all the REAL useful data / pieces are there to solve the problem.
No thanks.
I think if you showed these before/after menus to people from 5 years ago, most would tell you it’s a massive improvement.
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!”
i have seen all kinds of menu in my limited time. seeing the example, i would not critique on the choice of tool to "commission" the task for the menu. it would rather comment on the amount of f*cks the restaurant owner gave to getting one done.
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.
The ugly designs are sadly everywhere nowadays. Saw a poster at my gym - gave me the ick!
Somehow in the Netherlands it seems we have mostly managed to escape this. But it's just because people didn't really put any decoration on their menus before, and no decoration is still cheaper than shit AI decorations.
>AI makes something seem very convenient so small business do it because they are resource constrained >It's either not as convenient as it seems or has other undesirable side effects >Repeat
+ design looks better then the "minimal" style original
- 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
We have RUINED the food industry. It started with gig-work delivery. Restaurants will never recover from GrubHub and ghost kitchens. Food quality and service died years ago.
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.
Ok, I'll say it. I like the new menu better.
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.
Everything looks brown, it's crammed together, those not-photos make it feel really cramped in the third column, it looks like every other AI-generated menu and it's lost the clarity the old menu had.
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.
I feel like we read different articles, because without context, the pictured dish looked like overcooked pork chops served next to a type of carbonara tagliatelle topped with a fried egg & chives. I can't imagine anyone has ever set out to make spamsilog and ended up with the generated dish.
It's different in kind to a "my Big Mac is more squashed than the advert on TV" type situation.
> I've never in my life been served a plate of food that perfectly matched the picture unless it was a user-uploaded image
You can get damn close in Japan. I've even had situations where the food looks _better_ than the photos.
I wanted to be interested by the point of the author of this blog post, but a detail got my intention and then couldn't stop thinking about it:
Why TF did he blur all the prices of the menu in the pictures?
> Disturbing AI aside this tasted just like waking up at home and my mom cooking spam for breakfast.
Well one could argue that the menu now features _more_ spam than the actual dish.
It'd be one thing if it was just the problem of a generic AI slop graphic design that all looks the same, the problem is when it generates pictures of food that literally looks disgusting. I've seen some of these posted online where the food literally looks like it's infected (fries with weird black splotches), or the jalapeños look like tires, and it all triggers trypophobia.
Then you realize that the next version up is there is no menu for the human, there's only the menu for the AI, and the menu itself is an AI.
Of course the tragedy is that the actual food had the 'AI' treatment years ago (in the US), the artwork is only now catching up.
Reminds me of the inverse relationship between the detail of food images on a restaurant's facade and the quality of the food.
All they really need to do is provide images of their actual food, and the ai would do an extremely better job
I just remembered I have a few cans of covid-era Spam (maybe older?) in my pantry. Time for breakfast.
I buy rice from an online store that carries speciality Japanese varieties. The rice is very good.
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.
Could you please use a more readable variable-width font?
Honestly pictures in restaurant menus have been pretty bad long before AI. I don't understand how it can be accepted to show a picture that looks nothing like the served food.
Hand-made comfort food will be as much a luxury as hand-made menus.
It doesn't seem to be as much a trend in the UK - fast food, takeaways etc have some leaking in of AI - but when I went to Korea I was blown away by how many restaurants had these AI style menus.
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.
> The worst part is that I frequently work with small businesses in Austin and know that this is from a place of complete ignorance rather than feeling a sense of ownership in art/design they did not do.
> 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.
this one i really don't get. it seems pretty low-effort to me to just:
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?
Why not just tell their staff their menu makes their food look disgusting and they should use the old one? No real financial loss and it’s nice to help a small business. Owner might not know better or has slop reels telling them to do this
Ironic that this would be physical spam and the complaint is AI.
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.
My main problem is that AI art like this is more kitsch than a fucking garden gnome
I don’t understand this modern trend where people will put pictures of someone’s menu up, roast them, fall all over themselves talking about how over the food and still hit publish. What is the fucking point?
It is disgusting but only to a specific kind of autist. Everybody else doesn't care.
This should count as a form of segregation against such minority.
if the food tastes good, fugly menu can be forgiven
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do normies really find these appealing? they look like when robin's actor from 60s batman made a dog food brand that looked like malware
Alex, I'll take "who cares" for 200.
There is this new thing where people love to show off their sophistication that they can "spot AI". Every time they see an a Claudeism, every time they see an emdash, they talk about how they feel sick to their stomach and are ready to boycott the business that may or may not be guilty of the high crime of using a computer tool.
Yeah, this thought is lame. It's not so bad in other areas, but in food, I would really like to see REAL pictures of what I'm about to order. I mean, "fake" or deceitful pictures always existed, but at least there were real ingredients and so on. I will NEVER boycott some family restaurant because the menu is AI generated, but it is tasteless and I prefer not to see it.
But don’t you understand! A menu created with AI has no soul!