Comment by teo_zero
1 month ago
> 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.
If you're really passionate about serving the best quality coffee, you'll be passionate about the experience around that, and you'll put effort in even if it doesn't pay off.
AI-generated art signals that you didn't put effort in, and so aren't passionate about the experience, and so aren't really passionate about the central thing.
"At least you tried" is not a high standard, but it's the one that AI art fails.
I've thought about the specific example of distorted menu photos before as well and to me it also signals intelligence level in the proprietor. I can't imagine myself in that position, looking at that and saying, "yup, that's good." And I also have a hard time imagining not understanding why it looks bad, what one could have done to not make it bad. It feels like a distinct decision to be lazy.
And like you said, if they are that careless and unadept at one thing, how are they going to work the intricacies of an espresso machine and food safety standards? Not that an espresso machine is that hard to operate, but surely it's more difficult than maintaining the aspect ratio of a photo. You don't even need to know the term "aspect ratio" to get it right.
But I also have to admit that my expectations seem to be very off on this specific issue. My wife is quite intelligent (actual, literal genius) and even quite artsy, and yet I had to teach her how to not resize photos incorrectly, both for aspect ratio and quality by resizing too large. It's seems like such an easy thing to see and figure out to me. This must be how my 10 year old sees my chess play.
It's very hard to operate an espresso machine.
If you want to pull good shots you need to be adjusting grind (etc) every day and throughout the day. So it's a case where you have to check and adjust output continuously.
So for me that's especially a case where like, do you pay attention to detail and take time to fix obvious mistakes is probably the number one requirement.
>If you're really passionate about serving the best quality coffee, you'll be passionate about the experience around that
The degree to which the menu is part of "the experience around that" is exactly the debate here; you can't just claim it as axiomatic.
>AI-generated art signals that you didn't put effort in,
or it signals you spend your time sourcing the best beans, understanding the climate of the various bean producing regions, reading trade news for the coffee industry, ...
>"At least you tried" is not a high standard, but it's the one that AI art fails.
Again, says you
I think generally the opposite is true. A place with bad coffee but great decor can charge the same as a place with good coffee but crappy everything else. And so to maximize profitability, it does just that, meaning that at any price level, the place with the worst non-coffee has the best coffee. If you judge them by their posters, then what you’re paying for is the posters.
I think people complaining about AI art at businesses are making an aesthetic argument and then laundering it into ones with more heft. I mostly agree with the aesthetic argument, but it’s only that, not some wider indictment.
You could literally have a blank piece of paper with the word "coffee" printed on it in times new roman and it would look better than off ratio AI slop graphics. It's not a case where better necessarily costs more.
I also think that you are assuming here that the effort not spent on good signs is being spent on good coffee. That might not be true. It might be spent on nice chairs, or it might be being spent on pastries, or on non-coffee drinks, or one of the many other things a coffee shop can focus on. In fact even if coffee, maybe they do brewed coffee and espresso based drinks and cold brew and milk oriented drinks and milk-substitute oriented drinks. Which of these are they spending effort on?
The thing about coffee shops is actually that they tend to do a lot of things, and so unless they do almost of them well there's a good chance they don't do one of the things you care about in a coffee shop well. Consequently it makes sense to say "given that you don't do this thing well, there's a good chance there are other things you don't do well and those things might be important for me in a coffee shop".
While I agree with the general sentiment (people not putting effort is a bad signal), I also think people are sometimes being too harsh. Everybody has limited time and resources and knowledge. Making something (a business, a book, a website, etc.) means making some trade-offs with the resources you got.
When I can easily (without lots of effort/resources) check the quality of something, I prefer not to be that influenced by this type of "bad signals". Think of buying a coffee or trying a sandwich place. When I make a big investment, like a laptop or a TV, yes then it is a different story.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions that don't really hold up in reality.
I disagree, but it's also academic. Even if every single one of my assumptions is unfair, they're still being made by me and others. Restaurants need to consider the reputational risk caused by customer perception. There's a whole film about it [1].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382932/
2 replies →
sure i guess, but some of the best food i've ever eaten was in some cheap chinese restaurant that didnt care at all about the "experience" or w/e ^^
Yea I don’t get the GP/OP sentiment at all.
Some of the best food I ate in places that looked like complete design wrecks. And yes now these places use a lot of really badly made ai art.
The food is still delicious.
I think there's a difference between passively and actively putting no thought into something; generating a menu with AI involves deciding that it's worth having but that you don't care about the quality.
I don't know. This reply is AI generated and I really care
Generally for restaurants, the better the menu looks, the better the decor, the worse the food is. The 'hole in the wall' places are always the hidden gems. The slick-looking places are always a disappointment.