Comment by oeitho
14 hours ago
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.
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.
> 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?
Yes. In some countries, plastic versions of dishes are displayed.
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.
Pictures aren’t mandatory. Most restaurants don’t have them.
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?
Yes.
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.