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 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.
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?"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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).
>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
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:
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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....
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
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.
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 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!”
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Because the AI one are soul-less, and the badly drawn ones are not, simple as that.
Also why do they have sea life in it at all, surely that's not something that's meant to be in the pool.
Water equals fishes and stuff, I guess. Makes sense to me.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A high degree of polish was tangible evidence that someone in the organization gave a shit about their work.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
>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
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?
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.
They don't care, because it's only tangentially about the concrete output. It's about the hollowing of human communication and creativity.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Chalk writing robot/printer in the making ...
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
Escaping AI slop will become a privilege for the wealthy.
Well at least the peas weren't upside down...
https://preview.redd.it/the-peas-are-upside-down-v0-5pwo713b...
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!
This is unironically soulful though.
M.C. Escher opens a restaurant.
I don't think that's AI. It looks more like crappy photoshop.
Not even photoshop. Literal cut and paste of physical photos :D
+ 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
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.
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.
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....
Are you implying that Anthropic is using ChatGPT internally?
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.
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
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
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.
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
No we won't.
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.
I think the Japanese laws requiring strict truth in food advertising would be a good transplant.
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.
Senior citizens are the most vulnerable
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.
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.
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.
Pictures aren’t mandatory. Most restaurants don’t have them.
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?
Yes.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Nothing says delicious meal like the liberal application of the AI image piss filter
AI images (or even Stock Images) of food in a menu are false advertising. Full stop.
The ugly designs are sadly everywhere nowadays. Saw a poster at my gym - gave me the ick!
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.
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.
Perhaps in part Berkson’s paradox in action? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do miss tacky, over-styled menus sometimes. Doesn't excuse the fake food pictures though.
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.
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.
Except sometimes cheap places are great because the food is good and they don't spend money on ambience and other pretentious expenditures.
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??
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.
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.
Hand-made comfort food will be as much a luxury as hand-made menus.
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!”
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
Remember "Hey Look, It's Every Bootstrap Website Ever"? http://www.dagusa.com/
Yes, exactly. Bootstrap homogenized layout, and now AI seems to be homogenizing both layout and imagery at the same time.
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.
Alex, I'll take "who cares" for 200.
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.
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.
But don’t you understand! A menu created with AI has no soul!