URI: 
       [HN Gopher] Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
        
       Author : speckx
       Score  : 207 points
       Date   : 2026-07-22 12:49 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
  HTML web link (blog.fiddery.com)
  TEXT w3m dump (blog.fiddery.com)
        
       | gegtik wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | dec0dedab0de wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | Chalk writing robot/printer in the making ...
        
             | taude wrote:
             | The Tour De France had one a long time ago, writing chalk
             | signage on the roads [1]. I had to search for the YouTube
             | video about it....
             | 
             | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khffa2GkvPE
        
           | PyWoody wrote:
           | 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?
        
             | monk_grilla wrote:
             | > ... with software engineering going the way that it is.
             | What lateral like passion could I transition to, as she
             | did?
             | 
             | A question I ask myself increasingly frequently. Do let us
             | know if you find any answer.
        
             | bombcar wrote:
             | Don't let your memes be dreams! This time next month you
             | could be tattooing buffer overflows on someone's ass.
        
           | square_usual wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | alamortsubite wrote:
             | U.S. chains like IHOP and Denny's beat the mom-and-pop
             | immigrant restaurants by decades (and they are truly
             | terrible). I wouldn't be surprised if they got the idea
             | from even lower quality chains like McDonald's, but I'm not
             | old enough to know.
        
           | gegtik wrote:
           | I did say "scrawl",
        
         | Jtarii wrote:
         | Escaping AI slop will become a privilege for the wealthy.
        
         | cautiouscat wrote:
         | > 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.
        
           | Marsymars wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | iamleppert wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | datadrivenangel wrote:
         | Except sometimes cheap places are great because the food is
         | good and they don't spend money on ambience and other
         | pretentious expenditures.
        
       | FinnLobsien wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | spider-mario wrote:
         | Perhaps in part Berkson's paradox in action?
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox
        
           | FinnLobsien wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | jdw64 wrote:
       | 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
        
         | pietmichal wrote:
         | Remember "Hey Look, It's Every Bootstrap Website Ever"?
         | http://www.dagusa.com/
        
           | jdw64 wrote:
           | Yes, exactly. Bootstrap homogenized layout, and now AI seems
           | to be homogenizing both layout and imagery at the same time.
        
       | jvanderbot wrote:
       | Hand-made comfort food will be as much a luxury as hand-made
       | menus.
        
       | _override wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | reactordev wrote:
         | Senior citizens are the most vulnerable
        
       | tencentshill wrote:
       | I do miss tacky, over-styled menus sometimes. Doesn't excuse the
       | fake food pictures though.
        
       | duskdozer wrote:
       | I think the Japanese laws requiring strict truth in food
       | advertising would be a good transplant.
        
         | kdheiwns wrote:
         | Japanese menus are increasingly full of AI pictures as well.
        
       | TechSquidTV wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | floatrock wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | xeetzer wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | fwip wrote:
         | 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."
        
         | nitwit005 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | brap wrote:
       | 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!"
        
       | qgin wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | CookieCrisp wrote:
         | But don't you understand! A menu created with AI has no soul!
        
         | hei-lima wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | hei-lima wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | mjhay wrote:
         | 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
        
           | qingcharles wrote:
           | 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
        
             | decimalenough wrote:
             | C'mon, how bad can it be...
             | 
             | <click>
             | 
             | ...OK, that's not just bad, that's positively disturbing.
        
             | tortilla wrote:
             | "Great vibes. Great times."
             | 
             | Every restaurant/bar in my area has that phrase in their AI
             | flyers.
             | 
             | "All slop. All shit."
        
       | biophysboy wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | ghostly_s wrote:
         | 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....
        
           | huhkerrf wrote:
           | Are you implying that Anthropic is using ChatGPT internally?
        
         | mlekoszek wrote:
         | > 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).
        
       | kalleboo wrote:
       | 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
       | jalapenos look like tires, and it all triggers trypophobia.
        
       | _joel wrote:
       | Well at least the peas weren't upside down...
       | 
       | https://preview.redd.it/the-peas-are-upside-down-v0-5pwo713b...
        
         | whywhywhywhy wrote:
         | This is unironically soulful though.
        
         | huhkerrf wrote:
         | I don't think that's AI. It looks more like crappy photoshop.
        
           | abrugsch wrote:
           | Not even photoshop. Literal cut and paste of physical photos
           | :D
        
             | tomjakubowski wrote:
             | As a digital native, I was shocked to learn that
             | Photoshop's dodge and burn tools were based on real
             | physical techniques for photo development!
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodging_and_burning
        
           | Rendello wrote:
           | It's been floating around the Internet since at least 2019.
           | It's classic, _soulful_ bad editing.
        
         | abrugsch wrote:
         | 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!
        
           | ericpauley wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | _joel wrote:
             | small, medium and large.
        
         | qingcharles wrote:
         | M.C. Escher opens a restaurant.
        
           | _joel wrote:
           | "Yes sir, your table is upstairs, just go up via the
           | basement."
        
       | j4yav wrote:
       | Nothing says delicious meal like the liberal application of the
       | AI image piss filter
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | couchand wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | wingworks wrote:
           | Finally! We need more of this. It did happen sometimes in the
           | past, but not nearly as often as it should.
        
           | adw wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | OtherShrezzing wrote:
         | >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
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | 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?
        
             | qingcharles wrote:
             | Almost none, sadly. Most of the population just doesn't
             | have that skill, which is why places like Facebook are just
             | reams of AI Jesus upvoted to the Moon.
             | 
             | I saw this menu online the other day, and it's not even
             | discernable from the photo what the food products are; it
             | even sets off trypophobia:
             | 
             | https://imgur.com/a/YvyRjts
             | 
             | But people are still ordering it.
        
               | somewhereoutth wrote:
               | I suspect it is a fair representation of the food you
               | would receive - looks kinda like real food, but actually
               | isn't.
        
               | jackvalentine wrote:
               | Here is a picture of the food you actually get along with
               | the poster.
               | 
               | https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1uv0x
               | cq/...
        
               | ryandrake wrote:
               | I agree. For most people I've talked to, when this topic
               | comes up, they'll tell me they don't like AI, but then
               | cannot really identify it. Especially the elderly folks
               | in my neighborhood. You look at their facebook feeds and
               | it's 100% slop. No joke. Every. Single. Post. Is. AI.
               | Slop. And for the most part they can't tell.
        
               | qingcharles wrote:
               | The problem is in 2026 I work in this space and it's
               | getting to the point where I can no longer tell
               | sometimes. By next year we're probably all cooked. My
               | first go-to now on an image is TinEye.. if it first
               | appeared before AI then I know it's safe.
        
             | andrewflnr wrote:
             | They don't care, because it's only tangentially about the
             | concrete output. It's about the hollowing of human
             | communication and creativity.
        
             | customguy wrote:
             | What's the argument here? People don't like spit in their
             | food, how many people can tell their food got spat in? Does
             | that mean they're somehow wrong or to be belittled for not
             | liking spit in their food?
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | It's not an argument, it's an open question: do people
               | who express a dislike of AI know when they see a poster
               | that was generated with assistance from AI?
        
               | customguy wrote:
               | I meant to ask what the point of the question is
               | basically. What would change, what would it matter for,
               | if the answer was yes or no?
               | 
               | Besides it being so general a question to really be
               | useless as anything but an insinuation IMO, which is why
               | I'm trying to tease that insinuation out. E.g. are people
               | who use Apple left-handed? Are they gay? The answer is
               | "yes, some of them, of course, but also many aren't...
               | _why are you asking?_ "
               | 
               | There is no thing as "just a question, nothing in mind
               | really". That does not exist. The mind that can ask a
               | question cannot arrive at it in a vacuum.
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | OK, my point here is that a YouGov poll about people's
               | attitude to AI may not tell us anything actionable about
               | how people feel about AI posters - it depends on how good
               | they are at detecting them.
        
             | gtowey wrote:
             | I agree with others saying that this doesn't disqualify
             | complaints.
             | 
             | In fact, it can be precisely _because_ they can 't tell the
             | difference that they would be concerned about consuming AI
             | outputs when they don't know they are. If someone wants to
             | take a stand and only read human text and human art then we
             | may need regulation to add notices when text and images are
             | LLM outputs.
        
         | tgv wrote:
         | > 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.
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | joshstrange wrote:
             | This.
             | 
             | I said it elsewhere in this thread differently but people
             | want to pretend the options are:
             | 
             | 1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful
             | poster
             | 
             | OR
             | 
             | 2. Use AI
             | 
             | It's not, the money is often just not there to pay someone.
             | So you get whatever the intern or the owner can slap
             | together in whatever tool they know best (which is rarely
             | the best tool for the job).
             | 
             | It's completely understandable that they would reach for
             | LLMs to help improve their posters.
             | 
             | So many people are anti-AI/anti-LLM just because it is
             | AI/LLM, not because it's objectively worse than the
             | alternative. It's tiring.
             | 
             | It's the Electron vs Native argument all over again. Sure,
             | we'd all love hand-crafted, beautiful, low-resource native
             | applications for everything, that takes a lot of time
             | and/or money. It's a decision between Native and Electron,
             | it's a decision between Electron or nothing (or at best
             | only 1 OS supported).
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | What's weird here is that I should be in total agreement
               | with you.
               | 
               | I love it when AI tools are used to give people the
               | ability to solve problems that previously they could not
               | solve well.
               | 
               | For the fliers I'm talking about here (think a hardware
               | store promoting their summer sale) I don't think the
               | impact on the local poster design community is
               | meaningful.
               | 
               | And yet... the resulting posters put me off. I'm trying
               | to figure out why that is. I think the best explanation I
               | have is the lack of _intention_ behind them - knowing
               | that none of the visual details - the illustrations, the
               | typographic flair - had anyone thinking about them while
               | they were constructed.
        
               | steveklabnik wrote:
               | Okay I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and
               | here's my "I'm currently drinking my coffee" take on
               | this. I'm willing to be significantly wrong here, but for
               | the sake of discussion, here's where I think I'm at.
               | 
               | I also agree with
               | 
               | > I love it when AI tools are used to give people the
               | ability to solve problems that previously they could not
               | solve well.
               | 
               | But I also really hate these menus, I see them all the
               | time as well. I think that my conclusion is slightly
               | different than yours: in my opinion, just not a lot of
               | people have taste. That's sort of like, true by the
               | definition of taste, but what I mean is something more
               | specific: it's not _because of AI_ that I dislike these
               | signs. It 's because of what you said above:
               | 
               | > producing something that genuinely looks like a huge
               | improvement to them.
               | 
               | While it looks like a huge improvement _to them_ , it
               | does not to me. Our tastes differ.
               | 
               | Here's a version of this that doesn't involve AI at all:
               | last night I ate sushi at a place I'd never been before.
               | Their menu was a bit chaotic, and had a bunch of
               | annotations, along with a guide to those annotations. One
               | section had both "2" and "2 pieces" listed under the
               | options, and so I was confused: what was the difference
               | here? Turns out it's basically just a typo, both mean
               | that. Combine that with some spelling mistakes, and yeah,
               | I had a pretty bad impression of the menu. The sushi was
               | fine though, I'd go back. But this wasn't a super low-end
               | place, so the attention to detail being off made me a bit
               | worried before I actually ate the food.
               | 
               | Same problem, same issue, AI is really the only variable
               | here. And it is the natural downside of "democratization"
               | or "helping more people do more things", naturally, there
               | will be a lot more low-quality stuff out there than
               | before. That's not actually inherently a bad thing. But
               | it can feel weird.
        
               | joshstrange wrote:
               | I guess I see very little "soul" in most
               | marketing/advertising in the first place. It was slop
               | well before LLMs entered the scene. If my local hardware
               | store wants to put up a poster for their summer sale I
               | don't care if it's black comic sans on white paper or if
               | it's a AI-generated advertisement. Either way I'm not
               | looking that closely at it and neither version were going
               | to show up in an art museum or recieve design accolades.
               | 
               | There is so little intention in anything (again, even
               | before LLMs) so I don't begrudge places for using LLMs to
               | try and produce similar quality to what larger
               | chains/corps are able to commision.
               | 
               | I see this as similar to things like people wanting
               | "clean ingredients" or "sustainable packaging" or
               | "healthy food" in restaurants/bakeries/etc. They _say_
               | they want that but they are not at all willing to _pay_
               | for it. To be clear, I do wish those things were the
               | baseline, but they are not and unfortunately it is near-
               | impossible to compete with other businesses that don't
               | care about those things. At the end of the day consumers
               | see "$15 hamburger" vs "$10 hamburger", the better/fewer
               | ingredients, the better-paid labor, the recyclable
               | packaging, etc simple don't matter. This is _not_ an
               | argument to underpay workers, kill the environment, and
               | fill your hamburgers with sawdust, it's simply a
               | statement on how hard it is to compete when consumers
               | very rarely reward companies for doing things "right" no
               | matter how much lip-service they pay to it.
               | 
               | I've watched a close relative have people say "you should
               | do X thing!" where X is something like "fewer
               | ingredients" or "low calorie" or "healthy"-type things,
               | only to see sales crater after an initial boost. People
               | try it, they feel good about themselves, then they go
               | right back to buying the thing packed with sugar.
               | 
               | There is a wide gulf between "what people say that want"
               | and "how they actually behave". LLMs are currently in a
               | category where people can have visceral reaction and
               | claim "I'd never buy something from a company that does
               | that" but I can tell you right now that won't last. Be
               | anti-bad-design, be anti-bad-code but don't be anti-LLM
               | because that opinion isn't going to age well (and yes, I
               | know _you_ simonw, aren't anti-LLM, I'm speaking
               | generally).
        
               | customguy wrote:
               | > LLMs are currently in a category where people can have
               | visceral reaction and claim "I'd never buy something from
               | a company that does that" but I can tell you right now
               | that won't last.
               | 
               | Because people are struggling to make ends meet as wealth
               | gets more and more concentrated. It reminds me of that
               | really disgusting joke: why do sheep farmers like to fuck
               | their sheep just at the edge of a cliff? Because they
               | push back.
               | 
               | So yeah, people often make choices they'd rather not
               | make. Doesn't mean anything, just like that sheep doesn't
               | love the farmer and is grinding up against him, it
               | doesn't want to fall of a cliff and die.
               | 
               | And these companies take a few cherry picked snapshots,
               | never show the video, never show the aftermath, and brag
               | about acceptance. Fuck all of that, so much.
               | 
               | People don't _want_ all of humanity to be stolen from by
               | companies who then turn around and sue you if you violate
               | their copyright. That settles all of it, already. All
               | this stuff about quality and economics is irrelevant. We
               | hate people who steal from the little man to enrich the
               | wealthy, always did, always will. Where there is a  "we"
               | that isn't just isolated people playing pretend, you will
               | find this as the bedrock, maybe a layer above hating
               | child abuse. And making the "accept child abuse or robber
               | barons" option 10%, 20%, 50000% cheaper doesn't change
               | that in the slightest.
               | 
               | I'll go you one further: the very few ones who do, or
               | don't care, don't matter, because when it comes to ethics
               | and society they already checked out, and can stay
               | checked out. They got old, they lost what they were
               | supposed to hold on to if they ever had it, and that's
               | tragic, but mostly their problem which they want to
               | extend onto the people who don't have it.
        
               | ryandrake wrote:
               | > And yet... the resulting posters put me off. I'm trying
               | to figure out why that is. I think the best explanation I
               | have is the lack of intention behind them - knowing that
               | none of the visual details - the illustrations, the
               | typographic flair - had anyone thinking about them while
               | they were constructed.
               | 
               | I think that's exactly it, and it's not really hard to
               | articulate. You are simply noticing the lack of effort,
               | lack of care, and lack of craftsmanship that is inherent
               | in AI-produced slop. This isn't mysticism and it doesn't
               | take a sixth sense to detect. When someone puts no effort
               | into creating something, that lack of effort _carries
               | through the entire work_ , and is (or should be) obvious
               | and easy to spot.
               | 
               | Ask a schoolteacher. They can spot when someone half-
               | asses a term paper, and, at least I hope, they can spot
               | AI slop term papers.
        
               | dinfinity wrote:
               | Lost me at the last paragraph. Comparing billion dollar
               | companies to small businesses does not make sense.
               | 
               | The real reason for Electron apps being a thing is that
               | there is very little competition where they are used. If
               | chatting applications could properly communicate with
               | each other based on international standards instead of
               | being silos, nobody in their right mind would use the
               | trash clients that Slack and Whatsapp produce, for
               | instance.
        
             | vunderba wrote:
             | I called it out a while ago but the largest market to get
             | destroyed by gen AI was never the professional market - it
             | was the gig economy.
             | 
             | The quality of generative AI may not be top-notch, but it
             | presents an easy drop-in replacement for one-off tasks that
             | people previously outsourced to platforms like Fiverr
             | (voiceovers, logo design, clip art, copy editing,
             | translation, etc).
        
             | customguy wrote:
             | To me nothing a human makes has the capacity to be as
             | terrible on an existential level as genAI slop.
             | 
             | > something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to
             | them
             | 
             | Of course they think it's great, or they wouldn't be doing
             | it. That goes for everyone, with anything, ever. And some
             | customers probably think it's great, too. But if you want
             | me as a customer, to whom all those other opinions are
             | completely irrelevant, you'd be better off just putting a
             | turd glazed with boogers. Doesn't matter what it
             | advertises, I'll know a human made this, and look at the
             | product description.
        
         | jodacola wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | vkou wrote:
           | A high degree of polish was tangible evidence that _someone_
           | in the organization gave a shit about their work.
        
             | jodacola wrote:
             | Or a third party was paid a one-time fee to make something
             | look good - which still isn't a testament to the quality of
             | the first party's service they're providing.
        
               | vkou wrote:
               | Sure, but it means that they managed to pick third-
               | parties they work with _that give a shit_. They could
               | have always picked ones that didn 't.
               | 
               | When you're buying a pig in a poke (which is always the
               | case when you're a first-time customer), this is a
               | positive signal.
        
           | fer wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | > 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.
        
         | bigfishrunning wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | cautiouscat wrote:
         | > 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.
        
         | matthewowen wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | furyofantares wrote:
         | > 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.
        
       | whywhywhywhy wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | ivan888 wrote:
         | 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
        
           | mathw wrote:
           | No we won't.
        
             | mlekoszek wrote:
             | Never say never. People are paying through the nose for a
             | pair of JNCOs these days.
        
       | SirFatty wrote:
       | Alex, I'll take "who cares" for 200.
        
       | diabllicseagull wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | XorNot wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | cautiouscat wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | busymom0 wrote:
           | Gordon Ramsay in many of his kitchen nightmare episodes says
           | it's always a bad sign whenever a restaurant has photos on
           | their menu.
        
       | oeitho wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | joshstrange wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | mjhay wrote:
           | Pictures aren't mandatory. Most restaurants don't have them.
        
           | oeitho wrote:
           | Yes.
        
           | account42 wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | XorNot wrote:
           | 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?
        
           | pibaker wrote:
           | > 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?
        
             | markdown wrote:
             | Yes. In some countries, plastic versions of dishes are
             | displayed.
        
           | Marsymars wrote:
           | > 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.
        
         | kleene_op wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | oeitho wrote:
           | > 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.
        
       | varun_ch wrote:
       | 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??
        
       | a1o wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | dev0p wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | mathw wrote:
         | Also why do they have sea life in it at all, surely that's not
         | something that's meant to be in the pool.
        
           | sillyfluke wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | toilet wrote:
             | Reminds me of the scene in The Social Network (2010) where
             | Mark Zuckerberg points out the absurdity of playing a
             | looping video of the Niagara falls in the background during
             | a Caribbean themed party:
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9R8uYUXLUc
        
           | pessimizer wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | mablopoule wrote:
         | Because the AI one are soul-less, and the badly drawn ones are
         | not, simple as that.
        
           | dev0p wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | akomtu wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | codemog wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | unleaded wrote:
           | Art has never been about the objective quality of the work
        
         | dspillett wrote:
         | _> 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...
        
       | boonzeet wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | zer0tonin wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | joshstrange wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | mathw wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | OtherShrezzing wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | bschwindHN wrote:
         | > 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.
        
       | shibaprasadb wrote:
       | The ugly designs are sadly everywhere nowadays. Saw a poster at
       | my gym - gave me the ick!
        
       | account42 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Dwedit wrote:
       | AI images (or even Stock Images) of food in a menu are false
       | advertising. Full stop.
        
       | ghm2199 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | cheesecakegood wrote:
         | 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!
        
       | thomasikzelf wrote:
       | + 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
        
       | eloisius wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | kylehotchkiss wrote:
       | 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
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | Title could be " _Restaurants_ with ugly AI menu redesigns ".....
       | 
       | Thought it was going to be something about website nav bars..
        
       | maxglute wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Gud wrote:
         | No thanks.
        
       | GuinansEyebrows wrote:
       | 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).
        
       | somewhereoutth wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | voidfunc wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | recursive wrote:
         | Not caring is the middle ground.
        
           | pessimizer wrote:
           | Only if there were a group of people who were angrily
           | repelled by non-AI things.
        
       | xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
       | My main problem is that AI art like this is more kitsch than a
       | fucking garden gnome
        
       | greatgib wrote:
       | 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?
        
       | bayesnet wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | joegibbs wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | chupchap wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | forgotmymain10 wrote:
       | 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
        
       | hmokiguess wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | madhacker wrote:
       | if the food tastes good, fugly menu can be forgiven
        
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