I've noticed a very sudden uptick in these AI designed signs and menus in my area. I fully understand why they are used by small business owners (fast and cheap), and I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction.
That said, my own aesthetic sense is very much turned off by them. It is hard for me to articulate why, but I can name four reasons:
- The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious;
- The information is presented in a haphazard way, with text randomly thrown all over the place;
- There is really only one kind of "style" of these signs that I've seen, and it's sad to think that this style (or lack thereof) may become ubiquitous;
- In a world where AI feels increasingly shoved down our throats, it is unnerving to so suddenly see its rise manifested in the physical world.
I don't eat cereal and I can't think of the last time I ate at a restaurant that had pictures on the menu, but to your point I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist.
> How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?
If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture. That said, this is really only a problem for the store in respect of returns. If nobody is returning the product because it didn't look as advertised, there probably isn't any harm being done.
Indeed you are correct about this! What I think is different in these cases is that the images of the food in your examples (generally) aim to make it look good, whereas the AI art makes it looks like slop (literally and figuratively).
I also prefer the side case of actual photos of the food, which is common at delis and some more authentic Chinese restaurants; these are also being replaced quickly by AI.
Has AI art made my food less delicious - I don't think I've ever purchased food I've seen first represented by AI, but certainly the expectation of taste affects your perception of it...
> Then came a threat. An account with a much larger following DM'd her and told her to take down the sign, or they would post about it to their local artist community. The person offered to help her find an artist to pay to make a new sign, or else they would post about it.
> They gave her a day to "think about it."
When this is sort of behavior that the "good guys" advance then it's hard not to expect a "bad guy" with money to show up on the scene and thwart it.
It’s more about the way it was phrased and presented. Just sharing publicly available facts with your community (or anyone really) is not a problem in itself, but the message does rub me the wrong way.
The message’s author is trying to present themselves as someone helpful and compassionate (‘I understand’, ‘I’m trying at help’), but at the same time, they’re one-sidedly setting a firm and short deadline (‘I’ll give you a day’) unprompted and suggesting the café owner strike a deal with one of the people they’re going to recommend. They might have written this with good intentions at heart, but it also wouldn’t feel out of place in a mafia setting (as in ‘do business with us, or else’), so it’s a hard sell.
If they really were compassionate and wanted to help, they easily could have suggested to get the owner in touch with some affordable artists and left them with time to mentally deal with the backlash and all. They didn’t need to emphasise how they were going to tell on her like they were about to launch a vendetta smear campaign or something.
There are no good intentions here. This is the mafia playbook through and through - "It would be a pity if something were to happen to your <insert valuable property or reputation here>".
It literally is not. You can maybe phrase it to sort of sound like a threat but “I’m going to share your public ad” is never a threat. It’s like if you angrily yell “I’m going to come to a complete stop at this upcoming stop sign!” in a threatening voice and then do that, it wasn’t a threat. Great. That’s what the sign is for. That’s what everyone wants you to do.
In the context of how it was done, saying that they would give them a list of people and a day to think it over, it really is a threat, it's a kind of extortion.
I'm willing to bet most of these people don't even patronize her store because they are terminally online unemployed losers who can't afford more than freeze-dried Folgers.
Never let the mob win. They don't deserve her coffee, good riddance.
If you are sending threats to strangers on social media you are at minimum mentally ill, she has something to gain by losing them as customers.
Small businesses barely get by. Someone with work as transient as "artist" should know better.
Threatening people is unwarranted, but of course people are allowed to choose where they buy coffee for whatever reasons they see fit. If the market decides that stores with AI posters aren't the place to be then the business has to adapt.
Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it. I'd feel differently if some big corporate chain were doing this, but if it's a little "mom & pop"/"hole in the wall" type place, cheap advertising is a neutral-to-positive signal.
It was just a replacement for those temporary chalkboard menus, the person wo did that previously left. Perhaps she has bad taste but that doesn't mean she was slacking off. Did they spend a lot of time on the chalkboard menus previously?
How would a coffee shop spend an hour making their coffee better
Like you own a coffee shop and you’ve freed up one hour in the 12 weeks before you have to make a new sign, what do you do in that hour that makes the coffee better?
Nobody threatened the business owner. Somebody offered the business a chance to change up the ad (and help doing so) before it got shared, and the owner figured it would be better to go viral with the slop ad. Now there’s an article in Business Insider painting the business as the victim of mean customers that assaulted it by not liking the slop poster, so it looks like it all worked out for them.
the only "threat" mentioned in the article is that someone said that if she didn't take the sign down they would post about it in a local artist community. Threatening people with violence is always unwarranted, but trying to portray talking with other people about what someone is doing as a "threat" is disingenuous.
I think that issuing an ultimatum where if the person does not do what you want, that you will be sharing your concerns with likeminded people online, with the underlying implication being that the business owner will end up experiencing some kind of negative outcome from that, is absolutely a threat.
Exactly. Pure cancel culture. Just be humble to understand the world might not agree with your views and let it be. Less "this can't exist" and more of "this is not for me".
Cancel culture or not, people are allowed to tell other people they know that something is happening, and those people can decide for themselves to patronize the business or not. To call it a threat is really exaggerating.
The headline makes it sound like people are phoning in bomb threats and violence, which doesn't seem to be happening at all.
Okay, but I (and I suspect a lot of people) really don't care if somebody is threatened in that way. If the business person doesn't want other people to know what they're doing then maybe they shouldn't do it. It's not worthy of a news article, IMO.
If somebody threatens them with violence (which is what "threat" is usually implying) then that's a different thing entirely.
From a more... pessimistic/optomistic point of view (I'm really not sure which applies here, it depends how you look at it) It is also about a culture with absolutely no safety net, where AI and increased automation moving into someones field (in this case, graphic design work) isn't just "oh, less people will need my services" and more "My income will completely disappear and I will be broke/homeless faster than I can possibly learn something else fast enough to compete with the omnipotent AI".
The way to make these transitions less aggressive on everyone is to not have it tied directly to whether or not someone can afford to eat.
I don’t think it’s the artists who are doing things like this. It’s usually people who aren’t directly impacted and are “working” on other people’s behalf who do this sort of thing. I suspect it’s power-seeking personalities using a socially acceptable excuse to exercise power over someone else.
No it's about people thinking that I should care about their business when they clearly do not. When you use AI in these lazy ways it's clear that you just don't care.
That doesn’t even make sense. If you’re a customer before she puts up the sign it hasn’t magically made the coffee or the service worse. You want to force her to act the way you want, it’s that simple.
Dude, small business owners only have so much to spend on marketing. Before it was AI, it was stock images or Microsoft clip art. I don't care that my plumber has bad logo, it saving money on a logo keeps him from selling to PE and enshittifying his business.
I hope this karen isn't a bellwether. Trying to read the room, it doesn't seem we're at the stage where coffee shop clients will move on just because of an AI assisted menu. This is not scary AGI, just an easier photoshop. That may change, but given the huge fraction of US adults using AI (about half, with a quarter using it weekly), I predict a lot of resistance. A popular virtue signal requires less self sacrifice.
I would definitely be less likely to buy food/drink from a place with AI ads (because I don't trust that what they're advertising would correspond to what they're selling), but I can't imagine threatening someone over it.
I would once again like to point out that the "threat" mentioned in the article is someone saying they'll talk about what the shop owner did with their friends.
It's informing people that there is something a business is doing that they might not approve of and they might want to change their behaviour accordingly.
The owner's instagram apology post has a bunch of "I did not understand..."s and language about disrespect, etc-- which makes sense, they're trying to get out of trouble, but it is in a way dishonest. Things would be better if they felt they could write "I didn't realize you all hated this. Now that I know, I'll take it down. Sorry about that." because it avoids them feeling they were threatened into "falling into line". As it stands they were forced to lie to get out of trouble about something they didn't even realize was wrong (they don't actually care about AI, obviously, or they wouldn't have used it), and they are necessarily bitter as a result.
Not that they were in a position to figure that out, in the moment, but I think it is a good thing to take away from the story... The interpretation of transgressions as moral failures instead of mistakes has done a lot of harm to society in the past few decades, because it creates bitter people instead of resolving things cleanly. It's a failure of the whole norm around these things, rather than any individual per se; people are rarely in the position to realize their behavior is contributing to a toxic norm on a daily level.
Edit: even in this comment section there are a lot of people who are bitter about this (which showed up since I started typing this). Goes to show how important it is.
Personally I will not fault any individual for following a norm that they do not have the perspective to reject. So I think the coffee shop owner and the critics both screwed up here, by participating in shame-culture on both sides. However they did not know they could do differently---nobody has demonstrated to them the harm and degradation of their actions, nor what the alternative is. But as analytical outsiders we can make that observation and put it to use later by not practicing that behavior ourselves, and by helping others learn to not practice it either.
I do have compassion for people who are not tech oriented. AI art can seems a bit kitsch and novel at first, and they probably don't really think about ethical consequences very deeply.
The problem is it all looks the same, and those of us who are terminally online are exposed to it non-stop. AI slop seems to be poisoning every space that used to have quality conversations, and mass un-employing many creative professions.
People do have the right to vote with their feet though - it is perfectly ethical to support coffee shops that support the local artist community and avoid ones with AI "art". Too bad we've mostly lost the ability to rationally discuss things, instead of resorting to threats right off the bat.
Makes me wonder what constitutes a bigger danger for the society: putting up a bad taste AI-generated menu poster, or threatening people’s businesses for that action.
The article contains a rather beautiful example done via camera (and product photography demands that you get the froth and lighting just in time and just right) decorated by an artistic employee.
The owner had to resort to her standby Canva when the employee left, but lacking time due to a newborn.
To me, having followed all kinds of embedded links over to Vermont and Germany, the latter example being extraordinarily unappetizing. [0]
Stepping back to get the big picture, it seems to me that small business owners have gotten spoiled by local artists and artistic employees who created really beautiful signs and brochures. Come crunch time, it's either pay a local artist or DIY. And to get "pretty" artwork, many resort to AI, which mostly ain't pretty, sometimes pretty grotesque.
But this seems to be a case of wanting things both ways. AI is famous for really bizarre food rendering, as exhibited below. Customers really want food and preparation to look real. So why not set up a simple grid (say, Pages on a mac or Libre Office or Scribus) and pair the best photo you can grab with a description opposite it, on a nice background?
Other than KISS, you can get excellent art for a price, or slop for cheap (or at least, artificial art that advertises itself as such).
Increasing costs affect not only businesses, but people needing work, some of whom have lost jobs and income, are understandably upset.
The workflow I described can be done for little cost if DIY is not suitable, perhaps even a local photography class (who would work for (coffee) beans?)
I refer friends learning photography, intrigued by their phone cameras, and wanting to expand their skill set, to community college and other classes. Maybe even one of those starving artists.
Businesses brag about sourcing locally. I see a way to do so, but good art requires good artists, just as product photography requires some skill.
You can't have it all, or damn cheap. You must choose wisely.
P.S. My Dad was a commercial artist and I am an amateur photographer. And I make my own coffee. Yikes, the cost. If it's atmosphere, do put some nice art on the walls and let the product speak for itself.
The reaction folks had is OTT, but it does look like AI slop.
One group of folks is trying to say we basically have AGI. The other group is pointing to AI that remains very limited and where lowly humans can spot anything it’s created from a mile away. The evidence continues to point towards the later.
I mean there's a pretty big third group there which recognizes the good parts and the bad parts. Right?
For every person who can spot it a mile away I wonder how many false positives they have or simply aren't aware of it. If you're looking for it, with people using it a lot these days, of course you are going to have a high success rate.
But really I don't think it falls neatly into either of those categories.
> "Endeladyze said she felt terrible that she had upset her customers, but she was also frustrated at the idea that she should have been paying a real artist. Making these signs was a job only she had done herself or with employees in the past, never hiring outsiders."
This seems like the wrong attitude to take after experiencing such a backlash. If she'd made the signs herself for years then why resort to using AI to produce what is so obviously a generic slop result?
The article says she paid $150 for printing and $200 for a stand. Why not throw another $200 towards an artist?
The follow up instagram post, so the one after she showed off her awful looking sign:
> I want to address the recent conversation surrounding our fall menu boards.
> The design was created using gen AI. I want to be transparent about that. At the time, I genuinely did not understand the extent of the concerns surrounding AI-generated artwork, particularly the impact it can have on artists and the environmental concerns associated with it.
> My intention was never to disrespect artists, take credit for someone else’s work, or diminish the value of human creativity. I was simply trying to put together our fall menu during an especially busy and demanding time for me and our small team.
> That said, I have listened to the feedback. I understand why people have strong feelings about it, and I respect those concerns. Going forward, I have decided that Penny’s Coffee Shop will not be using AI for our menu artwork and promotional designs.
> What has been difficult for me, however, is the amount of negativity, personal attacks, and messages that followed this situation. There is a real person behind this small business. I am doing my best to run a local coffee shop, support my team, serve our community, and navigate being a new mom at the same time.
> I am always willing to listen, learn, and do better. I just hope we can have those conversations with kindness and respect.
> To everyone who continues to support Penny’s, especially through a challenging time for our business, thank you. Your support means more than you know.
Why does business insider make it seem like she's seething angry about this situation when the actual content of the response instagram post seems very level headed. (Rhetorical question, I know why.)
- I'm sorry
- I know my use of gen AI made it seem like I dislike artists
- That's not a belief of mine
- I'll prove that by not using gen AI at my cafe for this sort of thing ever again
- Please be kind to me, this is a small business and I'm very stressed out
Bam, perfect, hit everything a PR firm would tell you to say to make this go away as quickly as possible...
Talking to business insider was exactly the wrong thing to do after that. Your sign looks bad. You've made the awful mistake of telling more people about your bad sign with the intent of making them feel sympathetic. Even if they feel sympathetic, people still look at the bad sign you made in desperation along with the framing from BI and think... "oh so maybe she shouldn't be running a cafe then. This seems like she's barely getting by at this point".
On the flip side, telling someone "pay my artist friend or else I'll go out of my way to tell people primed to hate you based on a single detail, about only that 1 single detail" is actual old-school extortion.
> She was up during the night pumping for her three-month-old baby and was scrolling through the comments and DMs, horrified.
"At 4 a.m., I was holding my pump on my lap and replying to this person, 'I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it that way,'" she told me. "I was so into typing this message that I produced so much milk, it was dripping
Articles like this always rub me the wrong way. I don't know the term for it, but I feel you should be able to make the point without making us picture a new mother getting stressed breast pumping in the middle of the night.
I agree to a degree - it feels manipulative on the part of the writer, trying to exaggerate any sympathy a reader might feel.
That said, I also feel that the level of negativity the lady suffered was a little out of proportion to her 'crime' - essentially amounting to bullying.
I've noticed a very sudden uptick in these AI designed signs and menus in my area. I fully understand why they are used by small business owners (fast and cheap), and I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction.
That said, my own aesthetic sense is very much turned off by them. It is hard for me to articulate why, but I can name four reasons:
- The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious;
- The information is presented in a haphazard way, with text randomly thrown all over the place;
- There is really only one kind of "style" of these signs that I've seen, and it's sad to think that this style (or lack thereof) may become ubiquitous;
- In a world where AI feels increasingly shoved down our throats, it is unnerving to so suddenly see its rise manifested in the physical world.
I have some bad news for you:
• The pictures on cereal boxes aren't entirely real, either. They use school glue, not milk.
• Your burger has never looked like the one on the menu (see Falling Down)
• I've never eaten at a Chinese takeaway where the food looked like the light-up menu board, either.
How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?
I don't eat cereal and I can't think of the last time I ate at a restaurant that had pictures on the menu, but to your point I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist.
> How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?
If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture. That said, this is really only a problem for the store in respect of returns. If nobody is returning the product because it didn't look as advertised, there probably isn't any harm being done.
> If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture.
Has food ever looked like the picture, though? I find this position unrealistic outside of an Amazon return excuse.
Indeed you are correct about this! What I think is different in these cases is that the images of the food in your examples (generally) aim to make it look good, whereas the AI art makes it looks like slop (literally and figuratively).
I also prefer the side case of actual photos of the food, which is common at delis and some more authentic Chinese restaurants; these are also being replaced quickly by AI.
Has AI art made my food less delicious - I don't think I've ever purchased food I've seen first represented by AI, but certainly the expectation of taste affects your perception of it...
> Then came a threat. An account with a much larger following DM'd her and told her to take down the sign, or they would post about it to their local artist community. The person offered to help her find an artist to pay to make a new sign, or else they would post about it.
> They gave her a day to "think about it."
When this is sort of behavior that the "good guys" advance then it's hard not to expect a "bad guy" with money to show up on the scene and thwart it.
Do we know what said account is?
(If I were the coffee shop, I'd seriously weigh how much business versus hassle they're getting from being on Instagram.)
why is talking about this with their community a threat?
It’s more about the way it was phrased and presented. Just sharing publicly available facts with your community (or anyone really) is not a problem in itself, but the message does rub me the wrong way.
The message’s author is trying to present themselves as someone helpful and compassionate (‘I understand’, ‘I’m trying at help’), but at the same time, they’re one-sidedly setting a firm and short deadline (‘I’ll give you a day’) unprompted and suggesting the café owner strike a deal with one of the people they’re going to recommend. They might have written this with good intentions at heart, but it also wouldn’t feel out of place in a mafia setting (as in ‘do business with us, or else’), so it’s a hard sell.
If they really were compassionate and wanted to help, they easily could have suggested to get the owner in touch with some affordable artists and left them with time to mentally deal with the backlash and all. They didn’t need to emphasise how they were going to tell on her like they were about to launch a vendetta smear campaign or something.
There are no good intentions here. This is the mafia playbook through and through - "It would be a pity if something were to happen to your <insert valuable property or reputation here>".
"Threat" is a correct term for an attempt to compel action via potential negative consequences.
"Nice business you've got here, shame if something happened to it"
Its implied the talk is to rally the troops not gather general opinion
It literally is not. You can maybe phrase it to sort of sound like a threat but “I’m going to share your public ad” is never a threat. It’s like if you angrily yell “I’m going to come to a complete stop at this upcoming stop sign!” in a threatening voice and then do that, it wasn’t a threat. Great. That’s what the sign is for. That’s what everyone wants you to do.
In the context of how it was done, saying that they would give them a list of people and a day to think it over, it really is a threat, it's a kind of extortion.
I'm willing to bet most of these people don't even patronize her store because they are terminally online unemployed losers who can't afford more than freeze-dried Folgers.
Never let the mob win. They don't deserve her coffee, good riddance.
If you are sending threats to strangers on social media you are at minimum mentally ill, she has something to gain by losing them as customers.
Small businesses barely get by. Someone with work as transient as "artist" should know better.
Threatening people is unwarranted, but of course people are allowed to choose where they buy coffee for whatever reasons they see fit. If the market decides that stores with AI posters aren't the place to be then the business has to adapt.
i generally go to the store where the coffee tastes better
Using AI to make a sign is likely a pretty good indicator as to the effort the owner puts into other aspects of their business.
Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it. I'd feel differently if some big corporate chain were doing this, but if it's a little "mom & pop"/"hole in the wall" type place, cheap advertising is a neutral-to-positive signal.
It only signals to me that they have other priorities.
Correct, but they own a coffee shop, they aren't building rockets. The menu is definitely a significant part of it.
If they can barely do that, then I'm sure they're slacking off on more stuff too.
It was just a replacement for those temporary chalkboard menus, the person wo did that previously left. Perhaps she has bad taste but that doesn't mean she was slacking off. Did they spend a lot of time on the chalkboard menus previously?
> The menu is definitely a significant part of it
The overlap in skills between photographing your product and being a great barrista aren't obviously overlapping.
The takeaway seems to be to remove images from the menu.
Unless they use the time they previously spent making a sign into making a better coffee.
How would a coffee shop spend an hour making their coffee better
Like you own a coffee shop and you’ve freed up one hour in the 12 weeks before you have to make a new sign, what do you do in that hour that makes the coffee better?
Spending the money you would have wasted on a flaky local artist to draw an overpriced disposable sandwich board on better coffee beans.
The entitlement is off the charts. The more I read this insanity, the more I hope she printed it at Walmart with a discount coupon.
Yes. It's a sign they spend a lot of effort making good coffee and don't have a lot of effort left over to work on a sign.
The environment the coffee is served in is a significant part of the business.
They own the business, they don't make the coffee, nor did they make the sign they had earlier.
> They own the business, they don't make the coffee
You might not have spent a lot of time in the world of "small business", but this is hysterically out of touch.
Agreed. That's actually what OP said as well.
Nobody threatened the business owner. Somebody offered the business a chance to change up the ad (and help doing so) before it got shared, and the owner figured it would be better to go viral with the slop ad. Now there’s an article in Business Insider painting the business as the victim of mean customers that assaulted it by not liking the slop poster, so it looks like it all worked out for them.
the only "threat" mentioned in the article is that someone said that if she didn't take the sign down they would post about it in a local artist community. Threatening people with violence is always unwarranted, but trying to portray talking with other people about what someone is doing as a "threat" is disingenuous.
I think that issuing an ultimatum where if the person does not do what you want, that you will be sharing your concerns with likeminded people online, with the underlying implication being that the business owner will end up experiencing some kind of negative outcome from that, is absolutely a threat.
Exactly. Pure cancel culture. Just be humble to understand the world might not agree with your views and let it be. Less "this can't exist" and more of "this is not for me".
Cancel culture or not, people are allowed to tell other people they know that something is happening, and those people can decide for themselves to patronize the business or not. To call it a threat is really exaggerating.
The headline makes it sound like people are phoning in bomb threats and violence, which doesn't seem to be happening at all.
Okay, but I (and I suspect a lot of people) really don't care if somebody is threatened in that way. If the business person doesn't want other people to know what they're doing then maybe they shouldn't do it. It's not worthy of a news article, IMO.
If somebody threatens them with violence (which is what "threat" is usually implying) then that's a different thing entirely.
Oh, please. You know what they're threatening: an internet mob. That's not just "talking".
It was literally just talking, though.
This isn’t really about AI, it’s about a culture where threats and coercion in service of one’s own ideology have become normalised.
From a more... pessimistic/optomistic point of view (I'm really not sure which applies here, it depends how you look at it) It is also about a culture with absolutely no safety net, where AI and increased automation moving into someones field (in this case, graphic design work) isn't just "oh, less people will need my services" and more "My income will completely disappear and I will be broke/homeless faster than I can possibly learn something else fast enough to compete with the omnipotent AI".
The way to make these transitions less aggressive on everyone is to not have it tied directly to whether or not someone can afford to eat.
Thats true. This story makes me think artists are spoiled and entitled little shits, which isn’t fair to all of them of cause.
I don’t think it’s the artists who are doing things like this. It’s usually people who aren’t directly impacted and are “working” on other people’s behalf who do this sort of thing. I suspect it’s power-seeking personalities using a socially acceptable excuse to exercise power over someone else.
>This isn’t really about AI, it’s about a culture where threats and coercion in service of one’s own ideology have become normalised
This has always been a thing.
No it's about people thinking that I should care about their business when they clearly do not. When you use AI in these lazy ways it's clear that you just don't care.
That doesn’t even make sense. If you’re a customer before she puts up the sign it hasn’t magically made the coffee or the service worse. You want to force her to act the way you want, it’s that simple.
Dude, small business owners only have so much to spend on marketing. Before it was AI, it was stock images or Microsoft clip art. I don't care that my plumber has bad logo, it saving money on a logo keeps him from selling to PE and enshittifying his business.
I hope this karen isn't a bellwether. Trying to read the room, it doesn't seem we're at the stage where coffee shop clients will move on just because of an AI assisted menu. This is not scary AGI, just an easier photoshop. That may change, but given the huge fraction of US adults using AI (about half, with a quarter using it weekly), I predict a lot of resistance. A popular virtue signal requires less self sacrifice.
I would definitely be less likely to buy food/drink from a place with AI ads (because I don't trust that what they're advertising would correspond to what they're selling), but I can't imagine threatening someone over it.
I would once again like to point out that the "threat" mentioned in the article is someone saying they'll talk about what the shop owner did with their friends.
"post about it in a local artist community" is not exactly "talk about it with their friends."
It's bullying.
And if the shop owner is Jewish, it would be anti-semitism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
It's informing people that there is something a business is doing that they might not approve of and they might want to change their behaviour accordingly.
Imagine if it said "post about it on Hacker News". That's not bullying
The owner's instagram apology post has a bunch of "I did not understand..."s and language about disrespect, etc-- which makes sense, they're trying to get out of trouble, but it is in a way dishonest. Things would be better if they felt they could write "I didn't realize you all hated this. Now that I know, I'll take it down. Sorry about that." because it avoids them feeling they were threatened into "falling into line". As it stands they were forced to lie to get out of trouble about something they didn't even realize was wrong (they don't actually care about AI, obviously, or they wouldn't have used it), and they are necessarily bitter as a result.
Not that they were in a position to figure that out, in the moment, but I think it is a good thing to take away from the story... The interpretation of transgressions as moral failures instead of mistakes has done a lot of harm to society in the past few decades, because it creates bitter people instead of resolving things cleanly. It's a failure of the whole norm around these things, rather than any individual per se; people are rarely in the position to realize their behavior is contributing to a toxic norm on a daily level.
Edit: even in this comment section there are a lot of people who are bitter about this (which showed up since I started typing this). Goes to show how important it is.
Personally I will not fault any individual for following a norm that they do not have the perspective to reject. So I think the coffee shop owner and the critics both screwed up here, by participating in shame-culture on both sides. However they did not know they could do differently---nobody has demonstrated to them the harm and degradation of their actions, nor what the alternative is. But as analytical outsiders we can make that observation and put it to use later by not practicing that behavior ourselves, and by helping others learn to not practice it either.
Im shocked she spent so much to get it printed. The design looks so cheap
As an artist, or software engineer for that matter, you do not have an inalienable right to be paid for something that can be automated through AI.
"AI-generated" looks bad to a large minority of people. It is not clear if the majority notices, much less cares.
That aside, if you spend 5 minutes prompting AI, you can create an image that no one will clock as AI.
I do have compassion for people who are not tech oriented. AI art can seems a bit kitsch and novel at first, and they probably don't really think about ethical consequences very deeply.
The problem is it all looks the same, and those of us who are terminally online are exposed to it non-stop. AI slop seems to be poisoning every space that used to have quality conversations, and mass un-employing many creative professions.
People do have the right to vote with their feet though - it is perfectly ethical to support coffee shops that support the local artist community and avoid ones with AI "art". Too bad we've mostly lost the ability to rationally discuss things, instead of resorting to threats right off the bat.
Makes me wonder what constitutes a bigger danger for the society: putting up a bad taste AI-generated menu poster, or threatening people’s businesses for that action.
You have to wonder?
https://archive.is/GSXl6
The article contains a rather beautiful example done via camera (and product photography demands that you get the froth and lighting just in time and just right) decorated by an artistic employee.
The owner had to resort to her standby Canva when the employee left, but lacking time due to a newborn.
To me, having followed all kinds of embedded links over to Vermont and Germany, the latter example being extraordinarily unappetizing. [0]
Stepping back to get the big picture, it seems to me that small business owners have gotten spoiled by local artists and artistic employees who created really beautiful signs and brochures. Come crunch time, it's either pay a local artist or DIY. And to get "pretty" artwork, many resort to AI, which mostly ain't pretty, sometimes pretty grotesque.
But this seems to be a case of wanting things both ways. AI is famous for really bizarre food rendering, as exhibited below. Customers really want food and preparation to look real. So why not set up a simple grid (say, Pages on a mac or Libre Office or Scribus) and pair the best photo you can grab with a description opposite it, on a nice background?
Other than KISS, you can get excellent art for a price, or slop for cheap (or at least, artificial art that advertises itself as such).
Increasing costs affect not only businesses, but people needing work, some of whom have lost jobs and income, are understandably upset.
The workflow I described can be done for little cost if DIY is not suitable, perhaps even a local photography class (who would work for (coffee) beans?)
I refer friends learning photography, intrigued by their phone cameras, and wanting to expand their skill set, to community college and other classes. Maybe even one of those starving artists.
Businesses brag about sourcing locally. I see a way to do so, but good art requires good artists, just as product photography requires some skill.
You can't have it all, or damn cheap. You must choose wisely.
P.S. My Dad was a commercial artist and I am an amateur photographer. And I make my own coffee. Yikes, the cost. If it's atmosphere, do put some nice art on the walls and let the product speak for itself.
My two cents, or "Sixbucks" worth.
[0] https://x02.me/i/F7ZX6.jpeg
Reading headlines with this increasingly common format makes me irrationally angry.
The reaction folks had is OTT, but it does look like AI slop.
One group of folks is trying to say we basically have AGI. The other group is pointing to AI that remains very limited and where lowly humans can spot anything it’s created from a mile away. The evidence continues to point towards the later.
Much like CGI in movies, you only notice bad CGI.
I mean there's a pretty big third group there which recognizes the good parts and the bad parts. Right?
For every person who can spot it a mile away I wonder how many false positives they have or simply aren't aware of it. If you're looking for it, with people using it a lot these days, of course you are going to have a high success rate.
But really I don't think it falls neatly into either of those categories.
> "Endeladyze said she felt terrible that she had upset her customers, but she was also frustrated at the idea that she should have been paying a real artist. Making these signs was a job only she had done herself or with employees in the past, never hiring outsiders."
This seems like the wrong attitude to take after experiencing such a backlash. If she'd made the signs herself for years then why resort to using AI to produce what is so obviously a generic slop result?
The article says she paid $150 for printing and $200 for a stand. Why not throw another $200 towards an artist?
Sounds like she was undervaluing her previous employee's artistic skills.
The follow up instagram post, so the one after she showed off her awful looking sign:
Why does business insider make it seem like she's seething angry about this situation when the actual content of the response instagram post seems very level headed. (Rhetorical question, I know why.) Bam, perfect, hit everything a PR firm would tell you to say to make this go away as quickly as possible...Talking to business insider was exactly the wrong thing to do after that. Your sign looks bad. You've made the awful mistake of telling more people about your bad sign with the intent of making them feel sympathetic. Even if they feel sympathetic, people still look at the bad sign you made in desperation along with the framing from BI and think... "oh so maybe she shouldn't be running a cafe then. This seems like she's barely getting by at this point".
On the flip side, telling someone "pay my artist friend or else I'll go out of my way to tell people primed to hate you based on a single detail, about only that 1 single detail" is actual old-school extortion.
Everyone in this story is tiring and annoying.
My basic stance these days is 'if you were too lazy to do this yourself and handed it off to ai then why should i be motivated to engage with it'
This primarily, for me, has resulted in me ignoring a lot of long winded tickets.
the user a generate's email/documentation/whatever via claude > sent to user b > user b uses claude to summarize it ... loop is shitty.
This applies less to me for code as long as you are reviewing it throughly and 'sculpting' it throughly to make it readable/maintainable.
Care about your work if you want me to care about your work.
Live by the slop, die by the slop.
Heard this morning on NPR show: The 3 areas were AI fails from the get-go.
Creativity
Taste
Judgement
> She was up during the night pumping for her three-month-old baby and was scrolling through the comments and DMs, horrified. "At 4 a.m., I was holding my pump on my lap and replying to this person, 'I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it that way,'" she told me. "I was so into typing this message that I produced so much milk, it was dripping
Articles like this always rub me the wrong way. I don't know the term for it, but I feel you should be able to make the point without making us picture a new mother getting stressed breast pumping in the middle of the night.
ya it's cheap sympathy-raising and should be condemned
I agree to a degree - it feels manipulative on the part of the writer, trying to exaggerate any sympathy a reader might feel.
That said, I also feel that the level of negativity the lady suffered was a little out of proportion to her 'crime' - essentially amounting to bullying.