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55% Positive
Analyzed from 3146 words in the discussion.
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#food#generated#menu#don#bad#menus#restaurants#looks#quality#design
Discussion (72 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
https://preview.redd.it/the-peas-are-upside-down-v0-5pwo713b...
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.
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?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khffa2GkvPE
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.
I don’t get how AI images like this don’t open them up to false advertising lawsuits
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.
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
So until more people frequenting restaurants care it’s a relatively low risk and low cost way to update your menu.
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.
It's different in kind to a "my Big Mac is more squashed than the advert on TV" type situation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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??
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.