Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

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.

I get the consumers' ick when I see an AI-generated menu, logo, or sign as much as the next person. Beyond that, there is an argument to be made about the discrepancy between the pictorial depictions of a food item and what you are actually served in real life. I wish something akin to Japan's strict food packaging laws existed for restaurants.

I'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?

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.

Well at least the peas weren't upside down...

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

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.

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.

My personal opinion is that these days most people simply wouldn’t be able to tell that the photos are AI generated, and even if they could, they wouldn’t care or have any strong thoughts about it. I don’t think my parents or any adults aged 50+ in my family have spent any time at all playing around with AI image generation tools or comparing AI-generated images to non-AI-generated images to be able to have any opinions about these things.

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

I 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.

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.

AI images (or even Stock Images) of food in a menu are false advertising. Full stop.

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.

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.

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.

I think the Japanese laws requiring strict truth in food advertising would be a good transplant.

The ugly designs are sadly everywhere nowadays. Saw a poster at my gym - gave me the ick!

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.

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.

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.

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!”

Nothing says delicious meal like the liberal application of the AI image piss filter

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.

I do miss tacky, over-styled menus sometimes. Doesn't excuse the fake food pictures though.

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??

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.

Alex, I'll take "who cares" for 200.

Hand-made comfort food will be as much a luxury as hand-made menus.

It'd be one thing if it was just the problem of a generic AI slop graphic design that all looks the same, the problem is when it generates pictures of food that literally looks disgusting. I've seen some of these posted online where the food literally looks like it's infected (fries with weird black splotches), or the jalapeños look like tires, and it all triggers trypophobia.

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.

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

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.