10 ms·

Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

381 points by speckx 3mo ago

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
gegtik 3mo ago
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.
- dec0dedab0de 3mo ago
  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.
  - amelius 3mo ago
    Chalk writing robot/printer in the making ...
    - taude 3mo ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khffa2GkvPE
  - PyWoody 3mo ago
    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?
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - monk_grilla 3mo ago
      > ... with software engineering going the way that it is. What lateral like passion could I transition to, as she did? A question I ask myself increasingly frequently. Do let us know if you find any answer.
    - bombcar 3mo ago
      Don’t let your memes be dreams! This time next month you could be tattooing buffer overflows on someone’s ass.
      - inigyou 3mo ago
        First, an ass buffer is called a rectum. Second, I'd really prefer it didn't overflow.
    - HDBaseT 3mo ago
      How long until we see AI tattoo artists? I assume someone by now has tattoo'd AI slop onto their body (I've seen Tung Tung Sahur on a persons leg).
    - Breza 3mo ago
      One of my friends from grad school got a Masters of Public Policy then decided she would rather chalk menuboards for a living, spun up an LLC, and does amazing work. I admire people who are so willing to chase their dreams. I joke with my five year old that I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, except it's increasingly not a joke.
  - square_usual 3mo ago
    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.
    - alamortsubite 3mo ago
      U.S. chains like IHOP and Denny's beat the mom-and-pop immigrant restaurants by decades (and they are truly terrible). I wouldn't be surprised if they got the idea from even lower quality chains like McDonald's, but I'm not old enough to know.
  - gegtik 3mo ago
    I did say "scrawl",
  - quietbritishjim 3mo ago
    Indeed. It seems the parent comment has accidentally made exactly the opposite point than they intended. The difference between scrawl on a chalk board and a glossy menu with photos is not really the visual effect, it's the amount of effort and the virtue signalling - "my food is so amazing I don't need to make more effort than this". But that applies to AI menus too. "Why are these horrible AI slop photos on your menu?" "Because I'm too focused on food to hand create a perfect American Psycho minimalist menu"
- Jtarii 3mo ago
  Escaping AI slop will become a privilege for the wealthy.
- cautiouscat 3mo ago
  > Similar to someone just scrawling a sandwich board sign in chalk As opposed to what? This is usually a sign of quality. If it’s in chalk it’s because it changes as the restaurant experiments and tries new things.
  - Marsymars 3mo ago
    Yeah, there’s a great bar I sometimes go to where the taplist is a chalkboard because of their ~20 taps they’re typically changing at least one per day to a new keg.
iamleppert 3mo ago
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.
- datadrivenangel 3mo ago
  Except sometimes cheap places are great because the food is good and they don't spend money on ambience and other pretentious expenditures.
FinnLobsien 3mo ago
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.
- spider-mario 3mo ago
  Perhaps in part Berkson’s paradox in action? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox
  - FinnLobsien 3mo ago
    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.
jvanderbot 3mo ago
Hand-made comfort food will be as much a luxury as hand-made menus.
jdw64 3mo ago
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
- pietmichal 3mo ago
  Remember "Hey Look, It's Every Bootstrap Website Ever"? http://www.dagusa.com/ http://www.dagusa.com/
  - jdw64 3mo ago
    Yes, exactly. Bootstrap homogenized layout, and now AI seems to be homogenizing both layout and imagery at the same time.
_override 3mo ago
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.
- reactordev 3mo ago
  Senior citizens are the most vulnerable
tencentshill 3mo ago
I do miss tacky, over-styled menus sometimes. Doesn't excuse the fake food pictures though.
duskdozer 3mo ago
I think the Japanese laws requiring strict truth in food advertising would be a good transplant.
- kdheiwns 3mo ago
  Japanese menus are increasingly full of AI pictures as well.
  - avadodin 3mo ago
    Now they only need an AI to detect those and start filing lawsuits automatically.
TechSquidTV 3mo ago
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.
floatrock 3mo ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k7PJoNAXkk -- maybe this is just equalizing the enshittified food playing field.
- xeetzer 3mo ago
  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.
- fwip 3mo ago
  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."
- nitwit005 3mo ago
  I think the problem will tend to be more mundane. Picture shows nine chicken tenders, but you get three. You're going to wonder where your other six chicken tenders are.
brap 3mo ago
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!”
qgin 3mo ago
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.
- CookieCrisp 3mo ago
  But don’t you understand! A menu created with AI has no soul!
- hei-lima 3mo ago
  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.
hei-lima 3mo ago
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.
- mjhay 3mo ago
  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
  - qingcharles 3mo ago
    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 https://imgur.com/a/YvyRjts
    - decimalenough 3mo ago
      C'mon, how bad can it be... <click> ...OK, that's not just bad, that's positively disturbing.
    - tortilla 3mo ago
      "Great vibes. Great times." Every restaurant/bar in my area has that phrase in their AI flyers. "All slop. All shit."
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
biophysboy 3mo ago
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.
- ghostly_s 3mo ago
  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....
  - huhkerrf 3mo ago
    Are you implying that Anthropic is using ChatGPT internally?
- mlekoszek 3mo ago
  > But if I went to a “high end” place with an AI menu and instagram decor - bad, bad sign. Sometimes I wonder if this will settle into its own form of kitsch over the years, and whether people will someday try to emulate it (with a wink and a nod).
  - kbelder 3mo ago
    In thirty years, cool kids will be passing around memory crystals with a bootleg 2026 llm on it, so they can generate awesome retro AI images from back when AI still had soul.
kalleboo 3mo ago
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.
_joel 3mo ago
Well at least the peas weren't upside down... https://preview.redd.it/the-peas-are-upside-down-v0-5pwo713bsy831.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=ef62e7593528a0a5a60745ffcc374b42f753b30a https://preview.redd.it/the-peas-are-upside-down-v0-5pwo713b...
- whywhywhywhy 3mo ago
  This is unironically soulful though.
- huhkerrf 3mo ago
  I don't think that's AI. It looks more like crappy photoshop.
  - abrugsch 3mo ago
    Not even photoshop. Literal cut and paste of physical photos :D
    - tomjakubowski 3mo ago
      As a digital native, I was shocked to learn that Photoshop's dodge and burn tools were based on real physical techniques for photo development! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodging_and_burning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodging_and_burning
      - abrugsch 3mo ago
        Thank you! I suspected this to be the case, but was never interested enough to go and look up the history of the technique.
  - Rendello 3mo ago
    It's been floating around the Internet since at least 2019. It's classic, soulful bad editing.
- abrugsch 3mo ago
j4yav 3mo ago
Nothing says delicious meal like the liberal application of the AI image piss filter
simonw 3mo ago
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?
- couchand 3mo ago
  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.
  - wingworks 3mo ago
    Finally! We need more of this. It did happen sometimes in the past, but not nearly as often as it should.
  - adw 3mo ago
    One of the coolest things about seeing a show at the Fillmore is getting the posters they hand out. A number of bands sell, or have their artists, sell show posters (which then become collectible limited editions); it's way less offensive when it's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard than when it's Wizards of the Coast.
  - YurgenJurgensen 3mo ago
    https://xkcd.com/993/ https://xkcd.com/993/ A friend also called this the “Party Cannon effect”, in reference to black metal festival posters. When lavish detail is available at the push of a button, simplicity stands out far more.
    - tobr 3mo ago
whywhywhywhy 3mo ago
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.
- ivan888 3mo ago
  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
  - mathw 3mo ago
    No we won't.
    - mlekoszek 3mo ago
      Never say never. People are paying through the nose for a pair of JNCOs these days.
SirFatty 3mo ago
Alex, I'll take "who cares" for 200.
diabllicseagull 3mo ago
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.
- throwaway613746 3mo ago
  [dead]
- XorNot 3mo ago
  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.
- cautiouscat 3mo ago
  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.
  - busymom0 3mo ago
    Gordon Ramsay in many of his kitchen nightmare episodes says it's always a bad sign whenever a restaurant has photos on their menu.
  - tminima 3mo ago
    Genuinely asking, why is it considered bad? If it is done right, it will guide the customer better on whether they want something like it. We all see the photos/reviews on google maps before going inside a restaurant.
oeitho 3mo ago
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.
- joshstrange 3mo ago
  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.
  - mjhay 3mo ago
    Pictures aren’t mandatory. Most restaurants don’t have them.
  - oeitho 3mo ago
    Yes.
  - account42 3mo ago
    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.
  - XorNot 3mo ago
    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?
varun_ch 3mo ago
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??
a1o 3mo ago
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.
dev0p 3mo ago
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.
- mathw 3mo ago
  Also why do they have sea life in it at all, surely that's not something that's meant to be in the pool.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - sillyfluke 3mo ago
    This helped my nostalgic craving for those pedantic old school HN comments which I seem to see less of nowadays...But frankly as a kid playing in the pool often revolved around pretending to be some kind of sea creature.
    - toilet 3mo ago
boonzeet 3mo ago
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.
zer0tonin 3mo ago
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.
joshstrange 3mo ago
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.
- mathw 3mo ago
  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.
- OtherShrezzing 3mo ago
  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.
- bschwindHN 3mo ago
  > I've never in my life been served a plate of food that perfectly matched the picture unless it was a user-uploaded image You can get damn close in Japan. I've even had situations where the food looks _better_ than the photos.
shibaprasadb 3mo ago
The ugly designs are sadly everywhere nowadays. Saw a poster at my gym - gave me the ick!
account42 3mo ago
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.
Dwedit 3mo ago
AI images (or even Stock Images) of food in a menu are false advertising. Full stop.
ghm2199 3mo ago
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.
- cheesecakegood 3mo ago
  You might enjoy “Motel of the Mysteries” then, a large format illustrated paperback that I grew up with, which showed some hilarious conclusions about 1980s ‘culture’ by some future-millennia archaeologists. They conclude for instance that the TV box is an object of worship because all the architecture in the motel is designed around or points toward it!
thomasikzelf 3mo ago
+ 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
eloisius 3mo ago
These are absolutely consuming Taipei over the last few months. This spring I saw an AI-generated menu for the first time, and then it was like overnight that now on basically every street there's at least one restaurant that has an AI menu, sign, or window dressing. It looks awful and I can't understand how anyone thinks it's a good idea. Noodles give me skin-crawling ants feeling. Chopsticks pick up tofu without pinching it, as if it's drawn magnetically. Spoons dip sauce from bowls that are smaller than the spoon.
kylehotchkiss 3mo ago
Why not just tell their staff their menu makes their food look disgusting and they should use the old one? No real financial loss and it’s nice to help a small business. Owner might not know better or has slop reels telling them to do this
ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
Title could be "Restaurants with ugly AI menu redesigns"..... Thought it was going to be something about website nav bars..
maxglute 3mo ago
Google maps needs a tool to create menu from best user submitted pics. Still use AI to clean up lighting, masking, layout etc, but there's enough data to cover most popular dishes. Feels like all the REAL useful data / pieces are there to solve the problem.
- Gud 3mo ago
  No thanks.
GuinansEyebrows 3mo ago
Outside of cheap takeout places, I neither need nor want to see pictures of food on menus, because I can read the menu and decide for myself whether I want to try something based off the description. I'd rather a blown out flash photo of a plate of noodles than a generated image though. I was under the impression that FTC laws require food advertisement photos to be the "real" thing. I don't know if the FTC covers food service but if so I wonder if they just don't want to bother slapping restaurants with fines over generated product images in menus (or if menus just aren't covered by the same regulation). Also I wonder if there's some grey area when it pertains to "photos" vs "generated images" (though the latter is clearly intended to stand in for the former).
somewhereoutth 3mo ago
Of course the tragedy is that the actual food had the 'AI' treatment years ago (in the US), the artwork is only now catching up.
voidfunc 3mo ago
I think its interesting how sensitive some people are to AI generated everything and then there's a group of people who just straight up don't care. No real middle ground.
- recursive 3mo ago
  Not caring is the middle ground.
  - pessimizer 3mo ago
    Only if there were a group of people who were angrily repelled by non-AI things.
    - Planktonne 3mo ago
      There's definitely a group of people who trumpet continually that AI is going to replace everything soon and anyone who doesn't use it maximally will be left behind.
xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago
My main problem is that AI art like this is more kitsch than a fucking garden gnome
greatgib 3mo ago
I wanted to be interested by the point of the author of this blog post, but a detail got my intention and then couldn't stop thinking about it: Why TF did he blur all the prices of the menu in the pictures?
bayesnet 3mo ago
I buy rice from an online store that carries speciality Japanese varieties. The rice is very good. But this year they replaced their previously obviously-English-as-second-language-but-informative descriptions with just total slop that say absolutely nothing at all about the rice you’re buying. Every description is just platitudes about how good the rice is. So as in TFA we get people who seemingly can’t resist “pressing the button” and getting nice shiny results even if they aren’t, like, good. It’s nuts. FWIW I emailed the rice shop and politely asked them to revert to the old descriptions but received no reply.
joegibbs 3mo ago
GPT-Image has that horrible deep-fried look to it. Can't draw anything without looking like it's got grit thrown over the whole image. Nano Banana is much, much better here, it's often hard to tell if it's fake. Apart from that image generation is just the wrong idea for flyers since the resolution they put out is never enough for 300 DPI, the image always looks low-quality, the edges of the text are blurry and so on. Also the fact that the images in the picture look nothing like the real thing is unethical. I think you could have an AI system that makes menus correctly: the restaurant would take (amateur) pictures of all their menu items, give the system the names, descriptions, prices and so on, then the agent could use Nano Banana or something like that to give the images consistent lighting and angles, use a different model to remove the backgrounds and then write a menu in the desired sizes using HTML. That way the text could be perfect, the images could look like what you actually get.
chupchap 3mo ago
Restaurants used to have stock images everywhere from menus, to flyers, and posters. I don't remember much talk about it to the extent we have with AI generated images. I prefer to judge restaurants on the quality and taste of food, unless they're charging me a fine-dining rate for it.
forgotmymain10 3mo ago
404 Media had a great video discussing this a week ago (mostly in context of parties/community events and businesses) https://youtu.be/Pc_uE7JF63k?si=oY0ltoYDqU-KwL4a https://youtu.be/Pc_uE7JF63k?si=oY0ltoYDqU-KwL4a
hmokiguess 3mo ago
Then you realize that the next version up is there is no menu for the human, there's only the menu for the AI, and the menu itself is an AI.
madhacker 3mo ago
if the food tastes good, fugly menu can be forgiven
danpalmer 3mo ago
We've seen several new restaurants crop up on a busy restaurant street near us, and they all have AI generated logos and food images. All are bad, some are comically bad, some are just false advertising. So far none seem to be gaining traction. To me it just sets such a low bar for effort on such a basic part of the experience that I assume the rest of the experience and the food is similar trash.
dzhiurgis 3mo ago
Anti-AI derangement syndrome is real. Yes it’s not a great looking menu design, but most people (over in Europe at least) have no idea about phillipino food, so some idea what sisig or adobo is great. Anger over restaurant owner having access and capability to this insanely powerful tool is just so mean. Do you also hate if they use microwave, cooked on induction, used wrong type of oil, antibiotic meat, pesticidal vags, chemical cleaners, unethical coffee and people who work there are wrong race/gender/sexuality?
throwaway69123 3mo ago
All they really need to do is provide images of their actual food, and the ai would do an extremely better job
gnoll_of_gozag 3mo ago
do normies really find these appealing? they look like when robin's actor from 60s batman made a dog food brand that looked like malware
self_awareness 3mo ago
IDK, the menu is not that bad for a person that is outside the context and sees both menus for the first time. The photo is also not that bad -- of course it would be better to use real photos, I've no idea why they aren't doing this (probably reprinting menus is not a trivial problem), but it kind of gives some hints about the dish. As someone who doesn't have a clue, the new menu gives me some information that the old menu didn't.
tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
I've always assumed that pictures on the menu or in the window is an indicator of low quality food.
JodieBenitez 3mo ago
Apart from the AI/Not AI, I dislike photos on menus. It can be deceptive once the dishes are on the table or it can completely spoil the surprise.
- orphea 3mo ago
  I need photos in menu. I don't want surprises, I want to choose what I will eat, which is often extremely difficult when you only see cryptic names of dishes, maybe a list of ingredients too, if you're especially lucky.
  - JodieBenitez 3mo ago
    Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Where I live photos on a menu are mostly used for lower tier restaurants. It's not a good sign.
  - internet_points 3mo ago
    Ask the waiter and have an actual conversation with a human, or at least do an image search[0], either way you'll learn something and become a more experienced and cultured[1] human being. And you'll have a more truthful expectation than an AI image will give you. [0] https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=pot+au+feu&iar=images&noai=1 https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=pot+au+feu&iar=images&noai=1 [1] What's the English word for Bildung?
    - orphea 3mo ago
      Please refrain from giving unsolicited, patronizing advice. Thank you. I merely shared an opinion - to balance the OP's point - that some people [0] appreciate photos [1] on menus because they do help with choosing the dishes. [0] I'm sure I'm not alone here. [1] I didn't say anything about AI images, did I?
TheSpacerr 3mo ago
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dmaa 3mo ago
Recently I was shopping for curtains. Even though the shop I found has great reviews and a physical showroom with a real person, I took my business elsewhere when the web looks like this: https://en.vorhangbox.ch/curtain-home-consultation/ https://en.vorhangbox.ch/curtain-home-consultation/ . Why would you do this to your business? I always found generic photobank stuff to be the worst, but apparently the bar can go lower.
- thesimon 3mo ago
  > Why would you do this to your business? Maybe they hired someone to get a website and they were sold this AI slop? I've seen a lot of SMB in my area get terrible AI slop websites recently. After looking at the footer some "web agency" sold them. They claim to sell "hand crafted, no framework" websites, but it looks super terrible.
  - bombcar 3mo ago
    Many small businesses have websites made by a nephew or similar - and I’d expect lots of them love using AI now.
- vladms 3mo ago
  So how did the website of the place you moved to looks like? I don't understand what is so wrong with that website. I don't love it, I don't have it either. If you were looking for a business that makes websites and you don't like their website I would understand, but this is not the case here.
  - dmaa 3mo ago
    The creepy ai slop woman?
ludicrousdispla 3mo ago
Reminds me of the inverse relationship between the detail of food images on a restaurant's facade and the quality of the food.
bastscho 3mo ago
I always feel my hunger disappearing when I see ai generated images of food. I lose all appetite. The pictures never look appetizing. Sometimes I even feel like it is illegal to look at them, as if I look at something so unnatural my body warns me to look away.
- adamddev1 3mo ago
  I've seen some extremely unnatural ones, like börek that looks overstuffed or Afghan Kabuli Palau with what looked like chocolate squares instead of meat chunks! It feels like looking at sci-fi horror. The craziest offense I have ever seen was (in Germany) an add for a Turkish Kokoreç sandwich where they had a picture of the entire spit of the kokereç being cooked, unchopped, sitting in a bun!!
rsynnott 3mo ago
I don’t understand why people use this for _illustrated menus_, of all things. The uncanny valley is particularly offputting in the context of _food_, and ai-generated food images often look very wrong.
- roysting 3mo ago
  Because it’s cheaper, whether they got it through fiverr, did it themselves, or might even think it looks good? I don’t think a place that signs off on plating its dishes that way is thinking deeply about these kinds of things. The irony is that you could very well get AI to make a menu that looks far better, but whoever did this is clearly putting about as much care into it as the restaurant puts into plate presentation. It doesn’t really matter, a Philippine Hawaiian restaurant is probably not long for this world anyways. Most restaurants aren’t.
ben_w 3mo ago
Ironic that this would be physical spam and the complaint is AI. Sure, it is is an environmental disaster, churned out in industrial quantities, low-effort, an emulsified layer of mediocrity, slop everywhere, fouls the air for miles around; but that's true of AI, too.
KronisLV 3mo ago
> The worst part is that I frequently work with small businesses in Austin and know that this is from a place of complete ignorance rather than feeling a sense of ownership in art/design they did not do. > Yes I also understand many of them have slim margins, but TBH I would rather read a whole menu in Comic Sans, Papyrus, or Curlz MT than this garbage. I don’t think it matters what principled vs ignorant people think but rather how many of each kind there are. Put differently, does the average person care? Would they prefer a text only menu or an AI slop one, when the budget for making either is basically 0$? Who the average customer is also might change based on generation (younger people might be more averse to AI, or maybe not really and the ones who are averse are louder), and probably also how used to AI slop people get.
hathym 3mo ago
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anonzzzies 3mo ago
Yeah... The "Authentic Indian" curry house in my town replaced everything with AI. So the food really doesn't look like whatever they are serving. This was an issue always with plastic / pro photographed food, but now it costs nothing and it immediately jumps out as definitely not authentic.
benrutter 3mo ago
I think 5 years ago, we'd just have thought this was a "badly designed menu" and moved on, but now AI has taught us to feel a deep sense of disappointment with it's particular blend of poor personality-less design. I was looking at the documentation for cruft the other day and it's mascot is absolutely glorious. Not because it displays any semblance of "good taste", but just because it is the polar opposite of AI generated blandness[0]. Who knows - maybe in the future we'll start embracing signals of human amateurishness and ms-paint created menus filled with comic sans will take off. [0] https://cruft.github.io/cruft/ https://cruft.github.io/cruft/
- llm_nerd 3mo ago
  The AI overreaction is people extrapolating change forward in a linear fashion, not unlike the nightly news scarily reporting about some "trend" sweeping the nation (rainbow parties, polygamy, whatever), playing on people's fear that inevitably it is going to consume society. This restaurant probably has the "tech nephew" who played around with ChatGPT and they thought it looks fresh and new or something, and they probably said "ha and we didn't have to pay anyone!". And while it looks bad to us, for a while it will look "good" and "professional" to a lot of people. But eventually so many will have this same look that the whiplash will occur, everyone will reject it, and like you said then the differentiation will be the least AI looking.
prplfsh 3mo ago
What's sad is that that AI could make this better. Good food photography is hard. Here's a low effort pass of the photo that they shared https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a61faba10188191a4991f3042e640c3 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a61faba10188191a4991f3042e640c3 which I don't think people would find misleading. Right now it looks pretty "AI" but wouldn't be hard to find a style that works well.
- bel8 3mo ago
  could you share the prompt? that looks useful!
  - prplfsh 3mo ago
    https://chatgpt.com/share/6a61fc5f-66e8-83ea-bb87-a37a6a942bdd https://chatgpt.com/share/6a61fc5f-66e8-83ea-bb87-a37a6a942b... (with the photo from the article as the uploaded image)
memcg 3mo ago
I just remembered I have a few cans of covid-era Spam (maybe older?) in my pantry. Time for breakfast.
rldjbpin 3mo ago
i have seen all kinds of menu in my limited time. seeing the example, i would not critique on the choice of tool to "commission" the task for the menu. it would rather comment on the amount of f*cks the restaurant owner gave to getting one done. seemingly just like the OP i don't hail from japan, where you need to be careful with how you represent the food in your menu. in the DTP days, i have seen random stock images to represent dishes that never makes my table. to me it gives a similar energy. while everyone has their own technical capabilities, but you still have the final say on what to print. rest is a matter of taste.
sebastiennight 3mo ago
> Disturbing AI aside this tasted just like waking up at home and my mom cooking spam for breakfast. Well one could argue that the menu now features _more_ spam than the actual dish.
frereubu 3mo ago
My daughter's primary teacher last year was leading an English language lesson where the main task was to write a poem about a hot air balloon. Instead of finding existing poems about hot air balloons, of which there must be a lot even if they're not great quality, she pulled up ChatGPT on the digital whiteboard, wrote "Write me a poem about a hot air balloon" and said "do that". Sometimes people just don't care. (The teacher was "let go" soon after that, thankfully).
jillesvangurp 3mo ago
Small businesses tend to be very clumsy with stuff like this. Here in Berlin it's very common for small restaurants and food places to have half broken websites with some pdf as their menu. Their online marketing is generally pretty poor. Some of the more clever places at least stay a bit on top of their Google Maps presence. And menus are as much of an after thought. Some places have old printouts with faded pictures on the wall, unreadable specials on some chalk board, or just a cheap sheet of paper as a menu. There are exceptions of course. Some restaurants are clearly friendly with good designers. But mostly restaurants don't seem to overthink this. The issue isn't AI but the simple fact that many small business owners aren't very good at this stuff to begin with. They never were.
- SoftTalker 3mo ago
  There are a lot of small businesses here whose online presence is a Facebook page last updated 10+ years ago.
hluska 3mo ago
I don’t understand this modern trend where people will put pictures of someone’s menu up, roast them, fall all over themselves talking about how over the food and still hit publish. What is the fucking point?
alansaber 3mo ago
>AI makes something seem very convenient so small business do it because they are resource constrained >It's either not as convenient as it seems or has other undesirable side effects >Repeat
andrew_mason1 3mo ago
this one i really don't get. it seems pretty low-effort to me to just: 1. make the dish 2. take a photo of the dish 3. say "hey AI, touch this photo up to make it look nicer" and you'd get way better results than this samey slop that looks nothing like what you'll actually be served?
andunie 3mo ago
It is disgusting but only to a specific kind of autist. Everybody else doesn't care. This should count as a form of segregation against such minority.
jason_s 3mo ago
Could you please use a more readable variable-width font?
Anamon 3mo ago
I'm sure I'm in a bubble to some degree, but around me it feels like the negative reaction to anything GenAI isn't restricted to tech circles (though I live in a fairly tech-y town) and crosses the generations except for the oldest. And at least for me the negative reaction is most extreme for food. Because the one clear message that using GenAI output sends is, "I didn't care." And is that really the message you want to send when you're trying to sell food? These pictures have spread particularly much on food trucks around here, and my strict rule is that I won't even try any of them. If you have so little confidence in your dishes that you don't even want to show me a picture of it, why should I trust it and put it in my body? It shows the most extreme lack of caring, for a business category where care is one of the things most important to me. You know that someone proud of their cooking isn't going to cut corners or serve you something they don't stand behind. This shows they have no such pride, so I'm going to assume they by extension also have no such things as hygiene standards. G

381 points by speckx 3mo ago

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

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.

dec0dedab0de 3mo ago
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.
- amelius 3mo ago
  Chalk writing robot/printer in the making ...
  - taude 3mo ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khffa2GkvPE
- PyWoody 3mo ago
  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?
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - monk_grilla 3mo ago
    > ... with software engineering going the way that it is. What lateral like passion could I transition to, as she did? A question I ask myself increasingly frequently. Do let us know if you find any answer.
  - bombcar 3mo ago
    Don’t let your memes be dreams! This time next month you could be tattooing buffer overflows on someone’s ass.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      First, an ass buffer is called a rectum. Second, I'd really prefer it didn't overflow.
  - HDBaseT 3mo ago
    How long until we see AI tattoo artists? I assume someone by now has tattoo'd AI slop onto their body (I've seen Tung Tung Sahur on a persons leg).
  - Breza 3mo ago
    One of my friends from grad school got a Masters of Public Policy then decided she would rather chalk menuboards for a living, spun up an LLC, and does amazing work. I admire people who are so willing to chase their dreams. I joke with my five year old that I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, except it's increasingly not a joke.
- square_usual 3mo ago
  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.
  - alamortsubite 3mo ago
    U.S. chains like IHOP and Denny's beat the mom-and-pop immigrant restaurants by decades (and they are truly terrible). I wouldn't be surprised if they got the idea from even lower quality chains like McDonald's, but I'm not old enough to know.
- gegtik 3mo ago
  I did say "scrawl",
- quietbritishjim 3mo ago
  Indeed. It seems the parent comment has accidentally made exactly the opposite point than they intended. The difference between scrawl on a chalk board and a glossy menu with photos is not really the visual effect, it's the amount of effort and the virtue signalling - "my food is so amazing I don't need to make more effort than this". But that applies to AI menus too. "Why are these horrible AI slop photos on your menu?" "Because I'm too focused on food to hand create a perfect American Psycho minimalist menu"
Jtarii 3mo ago
Escaping AI slop will become a privilege for the wealthy.
cautiouscat 3mo ago
> Similar to someone just scrawling a sandwich board sign in chalk As opposed to what? This is usually a sign of quality. If it’s in chalk it’s because it changes as the restaurant experiments and tries new things.
- Marsymars 3mo ago
  Yeah, there’s a great bar I sometimes go to where the taplist is a chalkboard because of their ~20 taps they’re typically changing at least one per day to a new keg.

iamleppert 3mo ago

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.

datadrivenangel 3mo ago
Except sometimes cheap places are great because the food is good and they don't spend money on ambience and other pretentious expenditures.

FinnLobsien 3mo ago

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.

spider-mario 3mo ago
Perhaps in part Berkson’s paradox in action? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox
- FinnLobsien 3mo ago
  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.

jvanderbot 3mo ago

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

jdw64 3mo ago

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

pietmichal 3mo ago
Remember "Hey Look, It's Every Bootstrap Website Ever"? http://www.dagusa.com/ http://www.dagusa.com/
- jdw64 3mo ago
  Yes, exactly. Bootstrap homogenized layout, and now AI seems to be homogenizing both layout and imagery at the same time.

_override 3mo ago

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.

reactordev 3mo ago
Senior citizens are the most vulnerable

tencentshill 3mo ago

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

duskdozer 3mo ago

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

kdheiwns 3mo ago
Japanese menus are increasingly full of AI pictures as well.
- avadodin 3mo ago
  Now they only need an AI to detect those and start filing lawsuits automatically.

TechSquidTV 3mo ago

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.

floatrock 3mo ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k7PJoNAXkk -- maybe this is just equalizing the enshittified food playing field.

xeetzer 3mo ago
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.
fwip 3mo ago
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."
nitwit005 3mo ago
I think the problem will tend to be more mundane. Picture shows nine chicken tenders, but you get three. You're going to wonder where your other six chicken tenders are.

brap 3mo ago

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!”

qgin 3mo ago

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.

CookieCrisp 3mo ago
But don’t you understand! A menu created with AI has no soul!
hei-lima 3mo ago
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.

hei-lima 3mo ago

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.

mjhay 3mo ago
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
- qingcharles 3mo ago
  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 https://imgur.com/a/YvyRjts
  - decimalenough 3mo ago
    C'mon, how bad can it be... <click> ...OK, that's not just bad, that's positively disturbing.
  - tortilla 3mo ago
    "Great vibes. Great times." Every restaurant/bar in my area has that phrase in their AI flyers. "All slop. All shit."
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

biophysboy 3mo ago

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.

ghostly_s 3mo ago
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....
- huhkerrf 3mo ago
  Are you implying that Anthropic is using ChatGPT internally?
mlekoszek 3mo ago
> But if I went to a “high end” place with an AI menu and instagram decor - bad, bad sign. Sometimes I wonder if this will settle into its own form of kitsch over the years, and whether people will someday try to emulate it (with a wink and a nod).
- kbelder 3mo ago
  In thirty years, cool kids will be passing around memory crystals with a bootleg 2026 llm on it, so they can generate awesome retro AI images from back when AI still had soul.

kalleboo 3mo ago

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.

_joel 3mo ago

Well at least the peas weren't upside down... https://preview.redd.it/the-peas-are-upside-down-v0-5pwo713bsy831.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=ef62e7593528a0a5a60745ffcc374b42f753b30a https://preview.redd.it/the-peas-are-upside-down-v0-5pwo713b...

whywhywhywhy 3mo ago
This is unironically soulful though.
huhkerrf 3mo ago
I don't think that's AI. It looks more like crappy photoshop.
- abrugsch 3mo ago
  Not even photoshop. Literal cut and paste of physical photos :D
  - tomjakubowski 3mo ago
    As a digital native, I was shocked to learn that Photoshop's dodge and burn tools were based on real physical techniques for photo development! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodging_and_burning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodging_and_burning
    - abrugsch 3mo ago
      Thank you! I suspected this to be the case, but was never interested enough to go and look up the history of the technique.
- Rendello 3mo ago
  It's been floating around the Internet since at least 2019. It's classic, soulful bad editing.
abrugsch 3mo ago

j4yav 3mo ago

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

simonw 3mo ago

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?

couchand 3mo ago
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.
- wingworks 3mo ago
  Finally! We need more of this. It did happen sometimes in the past, but not nearly as often as it should.
- adw 3mo ago
  One of the coolest things about seeing a show at the Fillmore is getting the posters they hand out. A number of bands sell, or have their artists, sell show posters (which then become collectible limited editions); it's way less offensive when it's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard than when it's Wizards of the Coast.
- YurgenJurgensen 3mo ago
  https://xkcd.com/993/ https://xkcd.com/993/ A friend also called this the “Party Cannon effect”, in reference to black metal festival posters. When lavish detail is available at the push of a button, simplicity stands out far more.
  - tobr 3mo ago

whywhywhywhy 3mo ago

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.

ivan888 3mo ago
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
- mathw 3mo ago
  No we won't.
  - mlekoszek 3mo ago
    Never say never. People are paying through the nose for a pair of JNCOs these days.

SirFatty 3mo ago

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

diabllicseagull 3mo ago

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.

throwaway613746 3mo ago
[dead]
XorNot 3mo ago
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.
cautiouscat 3mo ago
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.
- busymom0 3mo ago
  Gordon Ramsay in many of his kitchen nightmare episodes says it's always a bad sign whenever a restaurant has photos on their menu.
- tminima 3mo ago
  Genuinely asking, why is it considered bad? If it is done right, it will guide the customer better on whether they want something like it. We all see the photos/reviews on google maps before going inside a restaurant.

oeitho 3mo ago

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.

joshstrange 3mo ago
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.
- mjhay 3mo ago
  Pictures aren’t mandatory. Most restaurants don’t have them.
- oeitho 3mo ago
  Yes.
- account42 3mo ago
  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.
- XorNot 3mo ago
  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?

varun_ch 3mo ago

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??

a1o 3mo ago

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.

dev0p 3mo ago

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.

mathw 3mo ago
Also why do they have sea life in it at all, surely that's not something that's meant to be in the pool.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- sillyfluke 3mo ago
  This helped my nostalgic craving for those pedantic old school HN comments which I seem to see less of nowadays...But frankly as a kid playing in the pool often revolved around pretending to be some kind of sea creature.
  - toilet 3mo ago

boonzeet 3mo ago

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.

zer0tonin 3mo ago

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.

joshstrange 3mo ago

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.

mathw 3mo ago
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.
OtherShrezzing 3mo ago
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.
bschwindHN 3mo ago
> I've never in my life been served a plate of food that perfectly matched the picture unless it was a user-uploaded image You can get damn close in Japan. I've even had situations where the food looks _better_ than the photos.

shibaprasadb 3mo ago

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

account42 3mo ago

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.

Dwedit 3mo ago

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

ghm2199 3mo ago

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.

cheesecakegood 3mo ago
You might enjoy “Motel of the Mysteries” then, a large format illustrated paperback that I grew up with, which showed some hilarious conclusions about 1980s ‘culture’ by some future-millennia archaeologists. They conclude for instance that the TV box is an object of worship because all the architecture in the motel is designed around or points toward it!

thomasikzelf 3mo ago

+ 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

eloisius 3mo ago

These are absolutely consuming Taipei over the last few months. This spring I saw an AI-generated menu for the first time, and then it was like overnight that now on basically every street there's at least one restaurant that has an AI menu, sign, or window dressing. It looks awful and I can't understand how anyone thinks it's a good idea. Noodles give me skin-crawling ants feeling. Chopsticks pick up tofu without pinching it, as if it's drawn magnetically. Spoons dip sauce from bowls that are smaller than the spoon.

kylehotchkiss 3mo ago

Why not just tell their staff their menu makes their food look disgusting and they should use the old one? No real financial loss and it’s nice to help a small business. Owner might not know better or has slop reels telling them to do this

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago

Title could be "Restaurants with ugly AI menu redesigns"..... Thought it was going to be something about website nav bars..

maxglute 3mo ago

Google maps needs a tool to create menu from best user submitted pics. Still use AI to clean up lighting, masking, layout etc, but there's enough data to cover most popular dishes. Feels like all the REAL useful data / pieces are there to solve the problem.

Gud 3mo ago
No thanks.

GuinansEyebrows 3mo ago

Outside of cheap takeout places, I neither need nor want to see pictures of food on menus, because I can read the menu and decide for myself whether I want to try something based off the description. I'd rather a blown out flash photo of a plate of noodles than a generated image though. I was under the impression that FTC laws require food advertisement photos to be the "real" thing. I don't know if the FTC covers food service but if so I wonder if they just don't want to bother slapping restaurants with fines over generated product images in menus (or if menus just aren't covered by the same regulation). Also I wonder if there's some grey area when it pertains to "photos" vs "generated images" (though the latter is clearly intended to stand in for the former).

somewhereoutth 3mo ago

Of course the tragedy is that the actual food had the 'AI' treatment years ago (in the US), the artwork is only now catching up.

voidfunc 3mo ago

I think its interesting how sensitive some people are to AI generated everything and then there's a group of people who just straight up don't care. No real middle ground.

recursive 3mo ago
Not caring is the middle ground.
- pessimizer 3mo ago
  Only if there were a group of people who were angrily repelled by non-AI things.
  - Planktonne 3mo ago
    There's definitely a group of people who trumpet continually that AI is going to replace everything soon and anyone who doesn't use it maximally will be left behind.

xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago

My main problem is that AI art like this is more kitsch than a fucking garden gnome

greatgib 3mo ago

I wanted to be interested by the point of the author of this blog post, but a detail got my intention and then couldn't stop thinking about it: Why TF did he blur all the prices of the menu in the pictures?

bayesnet 3mo ago

I buy rice from an online store that carries speciality Japanese varieties. The rice is very good. But this year they replaced their previously obviously-English-as-second-language-but-informative descriptions with just total slop that say absolutely nothing at all about the rice you’re buying. Every description is just platitudes about how good the rice is. So as in TFA we get people who seemingly can’t resist “pressing the button” and getting nice shiny results even if they aren’t, like, good. It’s nuts. FWIW I emailed the rice shop and politely asked them to revert to the old descriptions but received no reply.

joegibbs 3mo ago

GPT-Image has that horrible deep-fried look to it. Can't draw anything without looking like it's got grit thrown over the whole image. Nano Banana is much, much better here, it's often hard to tell if it's fake. Apart from that image generation is just the wrong idea for flyers since the resolution they put out is never enough for 300 DPI, the image always looks low-quality, the edges of the text are blurry and so on. Also the fact that the images in the picture look nothing like the real thing is unethical. I think you could have an AI system that makes menus correctly: the restaurant would take (amateur) pictures of all their menu items, give the system the names, descriptions, prices and so on, then the agent could use Nano Banana or something like that to give the images consistent lighting and angles, use a different model to remove the backgrounds and then write a menu in the desired sizes using HTML. That way the text could be perfect, the images could look like what you actually get.

chupchap 3mo ago

Restaurants used to have stock images everywhere from menus, to flyers, and posters. I don't remember much talk about it to the extent we have with AI generated images. I prefer to judge restaurants on the quality and taste of food, unless they're charging me a fine-dining rate for it.

forgotmymain10 3mo ago

404 Media had a great video discussing this a week ago (mostly in context of parties/community events and businesses) https://youtu.be/Pc_uE7JF63k?si=oY0ltoYDqU-KwL4a https://youtu.be/Pc_uE7JF63k?si=oY0ltoYDqU-KwL4a

hmokiguess 3mo ago

Then you realize that the next version up is there is no menu for the human, there's only the menu for the AI, and the menu itself is an AI.

madhacker 3mo ago

if the food tastes good, fugly menu can be forgiven

danpalmer 3mo ago

We've seen several new restaurants crop up on a busy restaurant street near us, and they all have AI generated logos and food images. All are bad, some are comically bad, some are just false advertising. So far none seem to be gaining traction. To me it just sets such a low bar for effort on such a basic part of the experience that I assume the rest of the experience and the food is similar trash.

dzhiurgis 3mo ago

Anti-AI derangement syndrome is real. Yes it’s not a great looking menu design, but most people (over in Europe at least) have no idea about phillipino food, so some idea what sisig or adobo is great. Anger over restaurant owner having access and capability to this insanely powerful tool is just so mean. Do you also hate if they use microwave, cooked on induction, used wrong type of oil, antibiotic meat, pesticidal vags, chemical cleaners, unethical coffee and people who work there are wrong race/gender/sexuality?

throwaway69123 3mo ago

All they really need to do is provide images of their actual food, and the ai would do an extremely better job

gnoll_of_gozag 3mo ago

do normies really find these appealing? they look like when robin's actor from 60s batman made a dog food brand that looked like malware

self_awareness 3mo ago

IDK, the menu is not that bad for a person that is outside the context and sees both menus for the first time. The photo is also not that bad -- of course it would be better to use real photos, I've no idea why they aren't doing this (probably reprinting menus is not a trivial problem), but it kind of gives some hints about the dish. As someone who doesn't have a clue, the new menu gives me some information that the old menu didn't.

tonyedgecombe 3mo ago

I've always assumed that pictures on the menu or in the window is an indicator of low quality food.

JodieBenitez 3mo ago

Apart from the AI/Not AI, I dislike photos on menus. It can be deceptive once the dishes are on the table or it can completely spoil the surprise.

orphea 3mo ago
I need photos in menu. I don't want surprises, I want to choose what I will eat, which is often extremely difficult when you only see cryptic names of dishes, maybe a list of ingredients too, if you're especially lucky.
- JodieBenitez 3mo ago
  Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Where I live photos on a menu are mostly used for lower tier restaurants. It's not a good sign.
- internet_points 3mo ago
  Ask the waiter and have an actual conversation with a human, or at least do an image search[0], either way you'll learn something and become a more experienced and cultured[1] human being. And you'll have a more truthful expectation than an AI image will give you. [0] https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=pot+au+feu&iar=images&noai=1 https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=pot+au+feu&iar=images&noai=1 [1] What's the English word for Bildung?
  - orphea 3mo ago
    Please refrain from giving unsolicited, patronizing advice. Thank you. I merely shared an opinion - to balance the OP's point - that some people [0] appreciate photos [1] on menus because they do help with choosing the dishes. [0] I'm sure I'm not alone here. [1] I didn't say anything about AI images, did I?

TheSpacerr 3mo ago

[dead]

dmaa 3mo ago

Recently I was shopping for curtains. Even though the shop I found has great reviews and a physical showroom with a real person, I took my business elsewhere when the web looks like this: https://en.vorhangbox.ch/curtain-home-consultation/ https://en.vorhangbox.ch/curtain-home-consultation/ . Why would you do this to your business? I always found generic photobank stuff to be the worst, but apparently the bar can go lower.

thesimon 3mo ago
> Why would you do this to your business? Maybe they hired someone to get a website and they were sold this AI slop? I've seen a lot of SMB in my area get terrible AI slop websites recently. After looking at the footer some "web agency" sold them. They claim to sell "hand crafted, no framework" websites, but it looks super terrible.
- bombcar 3mo ago
  Many small businesses have websites made by a nephew or similar - and I’d expect lots of them love using AI now.
vladms 3mo ago
So how did the website of the place you moved to looks like? I don't understand what is so wrong with that website. I don't love it, I don't have it either. If you were looking for a business that makes websites and you don't like their website I would understand, but this is not the case here.
- dmaa 3mo ago
  The creepy ai slop woman?

ludicrousdispla 3mo ago

Reminds me of the inverse relationship between the detail of food images on a restaurant's facade and the quality of the food.

bastscho 3mo ago

I always feel my hunger disappearing when I see ai generated images of food. I lose all appetite. The pictures never look appetizing. Sometimes I even feel like it is illegal to look at them, as if I look at something so unnatural my body warns me to look away.

adamddev1 3mo ago
I've seen some extremely unnatural ones, like börek that looks overstuffed or Afghan Kabuli Palau with what looked like chocolate squares instead of meat chunks! It feels like looking at sci-fi horror. The craziest offense I have ever seen was (in Germany) an add for a Turkish Kokoreç sandwich where they had a picture of the entire spit of the kokereç being cooked, unchopped, sitting in a bun!!

rsynnott 3mo ago

I don’t understand why people use this for _illustrated menus_, of all things. The uncanny valley is particularly offputting in the context of _food_, and ai-generated food images often look very wrong.

roysting 3mo ago
Because it’s cheaper, whether they got it through fiverr, did it themselves, or might even think it looks good? I don’t think a place that signs off on plating its dishes that way is thinking deeply about these kinds of things. The irony is that you could very well get AI to make a menu that looks far better, but whoever did this is clearly putting about as much care into it as the restaurant puts into plate presentation. It doesn’t really matter, a Philippine Hawaiian restaurant is probably not long for this world anyways. Most restaurants aren’t.

ben_w 3mo ago

Ironic that this would be physical spam and the complaint is AI. Sure, it is is an environmental disaster, churned out in industrial quantities, low-effort, an emulsified layer of mediocrity, slop everywhere, fouls the air for miles around; but that's true of AI, too.

KronisLV 3mo ago

> The worst part is that I frequently work with small businesses in Austin and know that this is from a place of complete ignorance rather than feeling a sense of ownership in art/design they did not do. > Yes I also understand many of them have slim margins, but TBH I would rather read a whole menu in Comic Sans, Papyrus, or Curlz MT than this garbage. I don’t think it matters what principled vs ignorant people think but rather how many of each kind there are. Put differently, does the average person care? Would they prefer a text only menu or an AI slop one, when the budget for making either is basically 0$? Who the average customer is also might change based on generation (younger people might be more averse to AI, or maybe not really and the ones who are averse are louder), and probably also how used to AI slop people get.

hathym 3mo ago

[dead]

anonzzzies 3mo ago

Yeah... The "Authentic Indian" curry house in my town replaced everything with AI. So the food really doesn't look like whatever they are serving. This was an issue always with plastic / pro photographed food, but now it costs nothing and it immediately jumps out as definitely not authentic.

benrutter 3mo ago

I think 5 years ago, we'd just have thought this was a "badly designed menu" and moved on, but now AI has taught us to feel a deep sense of disappointment with it's particular blend of poor personality-less design. I was looking at the documentation for cruft the other day and it's mascot is absolutely glorious. Not because it displays any semblance of "good taste", but just because it is the polar opposite of AI generated blandness[0]. Who knows - maybe in the future we'll start embracing signals of human amateurishness and ms-paint created menus filled with comic sans will take off. [0] https://cruft.github.io/cruft/ https://cruft.github.io/cruft/

llm_nerd 3mo ago
The AI overreaction is people extrapolating change forward in a linear fashion, not unlike the nightly news scarily reporting about some "trend" sweeping the nation (rainbow parties, polygamy, whatever), playing on people's fear that inevitably it is going to consume society. This restaurant probably has the "tech nephew" who played around with ChatGPT and they thought it looks fresh and new or something, and they probably said "ha and we didn't have to pay anyone!". And while it looks bad to us, for a while it will look "good" and "professional" to a lot of people. But eventually so many will have this same look that the whiplash will occur, everyone will reject it, and like you said then the differentiation will be the least AI looking.

prplfsh 3mo ago

What's sad is that that AI could make this better. Good food photography is hard. Here's a low effort pass of the photo that they shared https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a61faba10188191a4991f3042e640c3 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a61faba10188191a4991f3042e640c3 which I don't think people would find misleading. Right now it looks pretty "AI" but wouldn't be hard to find a style that works well.

bel8 3mo ago
could you share the prompt? that looks useful!
- prplfsh 3mo ago
  https://chatgpt.com/share/6a61fc5f-66e8-83ea-bb87-a37a6a942bdd https://chatgpt.com/share/6a61fc5f-66e8-83ea-bb87-a37a6a942b... (with the photo from the article as the uploaded image)

memcg 3mo ago

I just remembered I have a few cans of covid-era Spam (maybe older?) in my pantry. Time for breakfast.

rldjbpin 3mo ago

i have seen all kinds of menu in my limited time. seeing the example, i would not critique on the choice of tool to "commission" the task for the menu. it would rather comment on the amount of f*cks the restaurant owner gave to getting one done. seemingly just like the OP i don't hail from japan, where you need to be careful with how you represent the food in your menu. in the DTP days, i have seen random stock images to represent dishes that never makes my table. to me it gives a similar energy. while everyone has their own technical capabilities, but you still have the final say on what to print. rest is a matter of taste.

sebastiennight 3mo ago

> Disturbing AI aside this tasted just like waking up at home and my mom cooking spam for breakfast. Well one could argue that the menu now features _more_ spam than the actual dish.

frereubu 3mo ago

My daughter's primary teacher last year was leading an English language lesson where the main task was to write a poem about a hot air balloon. Instead of finding existing poems about hot air balloons, of which there must be a lot even if they're not great quality, she pulled up ChatGPT on the digital whiteboard, wrote "Write me a poem about a hot air balloon" and said "do that". Sometimes people just don't care. (The teacher was "let go" soon after that, thankfully).

jillesvangurp 3mo ago

Small businesses tend to be very clumsy with stuff like this. Here in Berlin it's very common for small restaurants and food places to have half broken websites with some pdf as their menu. Their online marketing is generally pretty poor. Some of the more clever places at least stay a bit on top of their Google Maps presence. And menus are as much of an after thought. Some places have old printouts with faded pictures on the wall, unreadable specials on some chalk board, or just a cheap sheet of paper as a menu. There are exceptions of course. Some restaurants are clearly friendly with good designers. But mostly restaurants don't seem to overthink this. The issue isn't AI but the simple fact that many small business owners aren't very good at this stuff to begin with. They never were.

SoftTalker 3mo ago
There are a lot of small businesses here whose online presence is a Facebook page last updated 10+ years ago.

hluska 3mo ago

I don’t understand this modern trend where people will put pictures of someone’s menu up, roast them, fall all over themselves talking about how over the food and still hit publish. What is the fucking point?

alansaber 3mo ago

>AI makes something seem very convenient so small business do it because they are resource constrained >It's either not as convenient as it seems or has other undesirable side effects >Repeat

andrew_mason1 3mo ago

this one i really don't get. it seems pretty low-effort to me to just: 1. make the dish 2. take a photo of the dish 3. say "hey AI, touch this photo up to make it look nicer" and you'd get way better results than this samey slop that looks nothing like what you'll actually be served?

andunie 3mo ago

It is disgusting but only to a specific kind of autist. Everybody else doesn't care. This should count as a form of segregation against such minority.

jason_s 3mo ago

Could you please use a more readable variable-width font?

Anamon 3mo ago

I'm sure I'm in a bubble to some degree, but around me it feels like the negative reaction to anything GenAI isn't restricted to tech circles (though I live in a fairly tech-y town) and crosses the generations except for the oldest. And at least for me the negative reaction is most extreme for food. Because the one clear message that using GenAI output sends is, "I didn't care." And is that really the message you want to send when you're trying to sell food? These pictures have spread particularly much on food trucks around here, and my strict rule is that I won't even try any of them. If you have so little confidence in your dishes that you don't even want to show me a picture of it, why should I trust it and put it in my body? It shows the most extreme lack of caring, for a business category where care is one of the things most important to me. You know that someone proud of their cooking isn't going to cut corners or serve you something they don't stand behind. This shows they have no such pride, so I'm going to assume they by extension also have no such things as hygiene standards. G