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 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?

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.

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/

https://preview.redd.it/the-peas-are-upside-down-v0-5pwo713b...

Apart from that image generation is just the wrong idea for flyers since the resolution they put out is never enough for 300 DPI, the image always looks low-quality, the edges of the text are blurry and so on. Also the fact that the images in the picture look nothing like the real thing is unethical.

I think you could have an AI system that makes menus correctly: the restaurant would take (amateur) pictures of all their menu items, give the system the names, descriptions, prices and so on, then the agent could use Nano Banana or something like that to give the images consistent lighting and angles, use a different model to remove the backgrounds and then write a menu in the desired sizes using HTML. That way the text could be perfect, the images could look like what you actually get.

I 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.

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.

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.

So until more people frequenting restaurants care it’s a relatively low risk and low cost way to update your menu.

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.

My partner and I usually just give a one star review each on Google when we pass by a place like this and then carry on.

From there, it's two possibilities:

-They care about the food at the expensive of design and it's going to be cheap and great (good) -They care about the food as much as the design and it's going to suck (bad)

This switch happened after a new place opened in my neighborhood that had AI signage and is now my favorite lunch spot.

There's always a class of restaurants where they don't care about repeat visitors. Think the cafe in front of a major tourist attraction: every day brings a new busload of 1-time patrons, those will always want the michelin-level pics to bait the 1-time foot-traffic in. The danger is the neighborhood mom-and-pops will start using the same trick without understanding they need repeat customers, and repeat disappointment kills a repeat audience.

But who knows... people with a TV budget have been using glue in their cheesy pizza commercials, soap in their beer glass foam, and motor oil on their pancake stacks for a long time -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k7PJoNAXkk -- maybe this is just equalizing the enshittified food playing field.

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.

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.

Well one could argue that the menu now features _more_ spam than the actual dish.

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.

Future alien confusion is all that Gen-AI pictures add. There is no value to them that is remotely redeeming/useful to us today.

https://youtu.be/Pc_uE7JF63k?si=oY0ltoYDqU-KwL4a

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!”

- dish in the top left is not on the menu (why is it there)

-- why is there a malnourished cow on the menu?

++ photos of of the product so you can see what you are gonna get

--- the photos do not match the actual meal

Now, they don't have to pay for or manage delivery people, or pay anyone to make their menus for them.

There are no consequences to lying. People have a bad experience sure, but they'll forget next time they order off grubhub and simply search for "burrito near me" and click on the first good looking food.

I do not understand the author's aversion. Sure we can talk about "picture of food" vs "what was served" but have you been... anywhere? This is the reality of all food advertisement. I've never in my life been served a plate of food that perfectly matched the picture unless it was a user-uploaded image. Getting a decent idea of what the dish looks like is valuable (especially for unfamiliar cuisine, obviously not unfamiliar to the author but I'd wager unfamiliar to most patrons).

Being anti-LLM/AI for the sake of it is boring. Show me mistakes on the menu or a level of unreality higher than the food industry at large and I'll care but I'm not seeing the problem here.

But this year they replaced their previously obviously-English-as-second-language-but-informative descriptions with just total slop that say absolutely nothing at all about the rice you’re buying. Every description is just platitudes about how good the rice is.

So as in TFA we get people who seemingly can’t resist “pressing the button” and getting nice shiny results even if they aren’t, like, good. It’s nuts. FWIW I emailed the rice shop and politely asked them to revert to the old descriptions but received no reply.

Thought it was going to be something about website nav bars..

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??

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

Do you also hate if they use microwave, cooked on induction, used wrong type of oil, antibiotic meat, pesticidal vags, chemical cleaners, unethical coffee and people who work there are wrong race/gender/sexuality?

Why TF did he blur all the prices of the menu in the pictures?

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).