5 ms·

I've noticed a very sudden uptick in these AI designed signs and menus in my area. I fully understand why they are used by small business owners (fast and chea

I've noticed a very sudden uptick in these AI designed signs and menus in my area. I fully understand why they are used by small business owners (fast and cheap), and I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction. That said, my own aesthetic sense is very much turned off by them. It is hard for me to articulate why, but I can name four reasons: - The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious; - The information is presented in a haphazard way, with text randomly thrown all over the place; - There is really only one kind of "style" of these signs that I've seen, and it's sad to think that this style (or lack thereof) may become ubiquitous; - In a world where AI feels increasingly shoved down our throats, it is unnerving to so suddenly see its rise manifested in the physical world.

sippingabonedry 16d ago
I have some bad news for you: • The pictures on cereal boxes aren't entirely real, either. They use school glue, not milk. • Your burger has never looked like the one on the menu (see Falling Down) • I've never eaten at a Chinese takeaway where the food looked like the light-up menu board, either. How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?
- JumpCrisscross 16d ago
  > How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious? If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture. That said, this is really only a problem for the store in respect of returns. If nobody is returning the product because it didn't look as advertised, there probably isn't any harm being done.
  - sippingabonedry 16d ago
    > If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture. Has food ever looked like the picture, though? I find this position unrealistic outside of an Amazon return excuse.
    - thenewnewguy 16d ago
      This isn't black and white, it's a sliding scale. Advertising, menu boards, box art, etc. do show the product in the best light possible and take artistic liberties, but are substantially closer to the real product than an AI that's never seen the product spitting out an image of a burger. It's reasonable to be annoyed when the menu board _isn't based on the product at all_ and thus is nowhere close to the real thing.
      - jackb4040 16d ago
        If I got served food at a restaurant and realized that the pictures were from a different restaurant, I would be pissed off in exactly the same way and amount as if a menu used AI slop. The only difference is that with AI slop you can tell ahead of time and decide not to spend money there.
    - jklinger410 16d ago
      > Has food ever looked like the picture, though? I find this position unrealistic outside of an Amazon return excuse. Yeah man it's unrealistic for restaurants to take pictures of the food they make and use that for the menu. Totally.
    - onion2k 16d ago
      I'd expect the picture to be an idealized, perfected version of the food. That's how marketing works. But somewhere in there should be the actual food even if it's cold, sprayed with glycerin, and under studio lighting. An AI image isn't anything to do with the actual dish. That's too far removed from the reality to be considered fair.
      - phoghed 16d ago
        Motor oil on a perfect pancake from a batch of 10 that they put 100x more effort into for the photo? Sign me up, I love it. AI image of a pancake because the small business owner doesn’t have a Kellog’s budget? Fuck that guy, I hope his business fails
  - data-ottawa 16d ago
    When most people have a bad experience at a restaurant they never go back, so the harm is hard to quantify until it stacks up.
- threetonesun 16d ago
  I don't eat cereal and I can't think of the last time I ate at a restaurant that had pictures on the menu, but to your point I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist.
  - phoghed 16d ago
    > I don’t eat cereal Wow, you really got him with this completely relevant fact that did not at all miss the point.
    - F3nd0 16d ago
      I think it’s relevant in that they lack the personal experience, and so can’t comment on the given points from experience, as they might be expected to.
    - janalsncm 16d ago
      I agree that it wasn’t a strong response, but 1) we can still be nice and 2) if you read the rest of their comment they do have substantive things to say.
  - janalsncm 16d ago
    > I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist Neither the images created by ChatGPT nor an artists rendition of a latte exist, but based on this logic you’d have a problem with both? I think most people are just reacting to the careless default style of ChatGPT, or the fact that a human didn’t draw it, not the fact that it’s not “real”.
- HanShotFirst 16d ago
  Indeed you are correct about this! What I think is different in these cases is that the images of the food in your examples (generally) aim to make it look good, whereas the AI art makes it looks like slop (literally and figuratively). I also prefer the side case of actual photos of the food, which is common at delis and some more authentic Chinese restaurants; these are also being replaced quickly by AI. Has AI art made my food less delicious - I don't think I've ever purchased food I've seen first represented by AI, but certainly the expectation of taste affects your perception of it...
- pizzathyme 16d ago
  It's not that it's fake. It's that it has a distinct style. I once thought that AI image/video would quickly become unidentifiable, but the surprising thing (so far) is that every new model release is followed by two reactions: "This is incredible" to "I recognize this style. It's AI. They're all the same." It takes only a few weeks. I've been amazed with our mind's ability to move the goalpost.
- the_gastropod 16d ago
  In the U.S., at least, this is not really true. The FTC has laws that prohibits companies from using non-food products (e.g., glue for milk or motor oil for syrup) in photographs of food they’re selling. They also have laws about deceptive marketing practices. These laws definitely aren’t perfectly enforced, but it’s hardly the widespread problem you’re suggesting it is. Also pretty funny to specifically highlight Chinese food, which has always looked like someone used a disposable camera to hastily snap a photo of a real plate of food about to be given to a customer sometime in 1997 in ~90% of the Chinese restaurants I’ve ever been to. AI obviously has 0 realness to it. So it’s worse in every way.
  - phoghed 16d ago
    In this cases isn’t it that they can use the glue for milk though because they aren’t selling the milk, it’s the cereal (enlarged for texture) that they are selling.
    - the_gastropod 16d ago
      Yes that is true. But, e.g., a restaurant that sells you a bowl of cereal would not be allowed to do this.
- cindyllm 16d ago
  [dead]
- fennecbutt 16d ago
  Ah, you've been downvoted by the holier than thou "nyeeeh!" crowd. You are correct though, especially fast food places using air brushed and photoshopped food photos are the inedible food object has been carefully set up. And no amount of petty votes will change the above.
- xboxnolifes 16d ago
  AI art has made the experience meaningfully less enjoyable.
- jackb4040 16d ago
  [flagged]
asdff 16d ago
It has this ick about it that makes me feel the owner lost mightily in a crypto pump and dump several times in life.
XorNot 16d ago
The food is in the uncanny valley because no human was involved in assembling the output. We've got millions of years of evolutionary wiring in our heads to try and figure out if something can be eaten - take that out of the process and you can screw up in a bunch of ways which raise alarm bells.
- sdenton4 16d ago
  Ancient cave dwellers wandering the steppes, carefully distinguishing potable lattes from poisonous varieties of herbal tea.
  - sublinear 16d ago
    Milk aside, lattes and tea aren't modern enough for this attempt at sarcasm to land.
  - dumberquestions 16d ago
    Did they know they were doing an expensive AI image detection training run.
mjmsmith 16d ago
I imagine that some?/many? customers of a locally-owned coffee shop are choosing it precisely because it's not a soulless megacorp. They're choosing a different vibe on purpose. Ugly AI advertising is the opposite of that vibe.
vidarh 16d ago
There are multiple widely replicated common crappy menu styles already. If anything AI generated menus are likely to lift the quality floor. I recall in particular when I first moved to London and realised you could identify low quality Italian restaurants by whether they had the same laminated plastic dessert menu from some distributor of ready made desserts... The step up was when they'd cut and pasted parts of that menu design into their own template... And keep in mind we notice the bad examples, because they stand out. They'll fade out of public consciousness as people get better at getting better output out of them, but they're not likely to disappear - menus have clearly been a low priority for a certain subset of places pretty much forever. If anything, it reliably signals "cheap".
- Apocryphon 16d ago
  There's a recent meme of AI-generated representations of food being notably unappetizing, even grotesque and repulsive: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ai-restaurant-food-images https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ai-restaurant-food-images
- phil21 16d ago
  I think there is a big difference between using AI generated food pictures, vs. taking real pictures of your food and using AI to create a menu/poster. The former is both weird, creepy most of the time, and false advertising. The latter is as you say - the state of the current status quo. I can tell that it's AI, but honestly it's just replacing low-effort human crud for low-effort AI crud. Doesn't bother me at all, it's actually a great use for the technology imo.
  - quietsegfault 16d ago
    What about the pictures of Chinese food above the counter vs. the actual food you get? There has ALWAYS been a big difference between advertisements and menus and what the food really looks like.
    - phil21 16d ago
      Funnily enough, I was thinking of exactly those photos when writing my comment. I never found them to be all that misrepresentative - that they took a photo from their family friend of their father taken 20 years ago for the same dish they are making me and have it on some faded menu board behind the counter is... honestly pretty close. It's the fake AI generated "shine" I guess that is the difference to me. Obviously totally made up, not real food, and made to look pretty. It's mostly the uncanny valley. Both are indeed false advertising, but the AI generated ones are so obviously made up and not real it's a little off putting to me. Wouldn't really stop me from ordering if I were already there, but it might make me order from their competitor if I were on Uber Eats or whatnot.
kamaal 16d ago
>>I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction. Im in India, ordered a bed from a carpenter, a week later he made a great a bed. He took pictures, and used some AI magic had it put it in more grand rooms. He posted it on his Instagram and Facebook feeds. The next day when I went to him to have it delivered to my place, he showed me he had received lots of offers to make the same bed for other people and his order book was full for the next few months. Until the robots actually arrive to do his work, AI in many way is going to a huge positive for him. Its going to be the same case for many many such people.
pseudohadamard 16d ago
> The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious; Whereas with non-AI-generated food pics you know that the McPlastic burger you order will look exactly, totally, 100% like the one in the photo.
- johnofthesea 16d ago
  And your point is ...?
  - threatofrain 16d ago
    We were feasting on lies. Rather than demand honesty our instincts instead reach for a deathly sort of deliciousness. Anyways what was your point in the discussion?
    - ryandrake 16d ago
      We'd rather have the artisanal hand-crafted lies of the past than today's AI-generated lies.

sippingabonedry 16d ago

I have some bad news for you: • The pictures on cereal boxes aren't entirely real, either. They use school glue, not milk. • Your burger has never looked like the one on the menu (see Falling Down) • I've never eaten at a Chinese takeaway where the food looked like the light-up menu board, either. How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?

JumpCrisscross 16d ago
> How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious? If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture. That said, this is really only a problem for the store in respect of returns. If nobody is returning the product because it didn't look as advertised, there probably isn't any harm being done.
- sippingabonedry 16d ago
  > If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture. Has food ever looked like the picture, though? I find this position unrealistic outside of an Amazon return excuse.
  - thenewnewguy 16d ago
    This isn't black and white, it's a sliding scale. Advertising, menu boards, box art, etc. do show the product in the best light possible and take artistic liberties, but are substantially closer to the real product than an AI that's never seen the product spitting out an image of a burger. It's reasonable to be annoyed when the menu board _isn't based on the product at all_ and thus is nowhere close to the real thing.
    - jackb4040 16d ago
      If I got served food at a restaurant and realized that the pictures were from a different restaurant, I would be pissed off in exactly the same way and amount as if a menu used AI slop. The only difference is that with AI slop you can tell ahead of time and decide not to spend money there.
  - jklinger410 16d ago
    > Has food ever looked like the picture, though? I find this position unrealistic outside of an Amazon return excuse. Yeah man it's unrealistic for restaurants to take pictures of the food they make and use that for the menu. Totally.
  - onion2k 16d ago
    I'd expect the picture to be an idealized, perfected version of the food. That's how marketing works. But somewhere in there should be the actual food even if it's cold, sprayed with glycerin, and under studio lighting. An AI image isn't anything to do with the actual dish. That's too far removed from the reality to be considered fair.
    - phoghed 16d ago
      Motor oil on a perfect pancake from a batch of 10 that they put 100x more effort into for the photo? Sign me up, I love it. AI image of a pancake because the small business owner doesn’t have a Kellog’s budget? Fuck that guy, I hope his business fails
- data-ottawa 16d ago
  When most people have a bad experience at a restaurant they never go back, so the harm is hard to quantify until it stacks up.
threetonesun 16d ago
I don't eat cereal and I can't think of the last time I ate at a restaurant that had pictures on the menu, but to your point I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist.
- phoghed 16d ago
  > I don’t eat cereal Wow, you really got him with this completely relevant fact that did not at all miss the point.
  - F3nd0 16d ago
    I think it’s relevant in that they lack the personal experience, and so can’t comment on the given points from experience, as they might be expected to.
  - janalsncm 16d ago
    I agree that it wasn’t a strong response, but 1) we can still be nice and 2) if you read the rest of their comment they do have substantive things to say.
- janalsncm 16d ago
  > I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist Neither the images created by ChatGPT nor an artists rendition of a latte exist, but based on this logic you’d have a problem with both? I think most people are just reacting to the careless default style of ChatGPT, or the fact that a human didn’t draw it, not the fact that it’s not “real”.
HanShotFirst 16d ago
Indeed you are correct about this! What I think is different in these cases is that the images of the food in your examples (generally) aim to make it look good, whereas the AI art makes it looks like slop (literally and figuratively). I also prefer the side case of actual photos of the food, which is common at delis and some more authentic Chinese restaurants; these are also being replaced quickly by AI. Has AI art made my food less delicious - I don't think I've ever purchased food I've seen first represented by AI, but certainly the expectation of taste affects your perception of it...
pizzathyme 16d ago
It's not that it's fake. It's that it has a distinct style. I once thought that AI image/video would quickly become unidentifiable, but the surprising thing (so far) is that every new model release is followed by two reactions: "This is incredible" to "I recognize this style. It's AI. They're all the same." It takes only a few weeks. I've been amazed with our mind's ability to move the goalpost.
the_gastropod 16d ago
In the U.S., at least, this is not really true. The FTC has laws that prohibits companies from using non-food products (e.g., glue for milk or motor oil for syrup) in photographs of food they’re selling. They also have laws about deceptive marketing practices. These laws definitely aren’t perfectly enforced, but it’s hardly the widespread problem you’re suggesting it is. Also pretty funny to specifically highlight Chinese food, which has always looked like someone used a disposable camera to hastily snap a photo of a real plate of food about to be given to a customer sometime in 1997 in ~90% of the Chinese restaurants I’ve ever been to. AI obviously has 0 realness to it. So it’s worse in every way.
- phoghed 16d ago
  In this cases isn’t it that they can use the glue for milk though because they aren’t selling the milk, it’s the cereal (enlarged for texture) that they are selling.
  - the_gastropod 16d ago
    Yes that is true. But, e.g., a restaurant that sells you a bowl of cereal would not be allowed to do this.
cindyllm 16d ago
[dead]
fennecbutt 16d ago
Ah, you've been downvoted by the holier than thou "nyeeeh!" crowd. You are correct though, especially fast food places using air brushed and photoshopped food photos are the inedible food object has been carefully set up. And no amount of petty votes will change the above.
xboxnolifes 16d ago
AI art has made the experience meaningfully less enjoyable.
jackb4040 16d ago
[flagged]

asdff 16d ago

It has this ick about it that makes me feel the owner lost mightily in a crypto pump and dump several times in life.

XorNot 16d ago

The food is in the uncanny valley because no human was involved in assembling the output. We've got millions of years of evolutionary wiring in our heads to try and figure out if something can be eaten - take that out of the process and you can screw up in a bunch of ways which raise alarm bells.

sdenton4 16d ago
Ancient cave dwellers wandering the steppes, carefully distinguishing potable lattes from poisonous varieties of herbal tea.
- sublinear 16d ago
  Milk aside, lattes and tea aren't modern enough for this attempt at sarcasm to land.
- dumberquestions 16d ago
  Did they know they were doing an expensive AI image detection training run.

mjmsmith 16d ago

I imagine that some?/many? customers of a locally-owned coffee shop are choosing it precisely because it's not a soulless megacorp. They're choosing a different vibe on purpose. Ugly AI advertising is the opposite of that vibe.

vidarh 16d ago

There are multiple widely replicated common crappy menu styles already. If anything AI generated menus are likely to lift the quality floor. I recall in particular when I first moved to London and realised you could identify low quality Italian restaurants by whether they had the same laminated plastic dessert menu from some distributor of ready made desserts... The step up was when they'd cut and pasted parts of that menu design into their own template... And keep in mind we notice the bad examples, because they stand out. They'll fade out of public consciousness as people get better at getting better output out of them, but they're not likely to disappear - menus have clearly been a low priority for a certain subset of places pretty much forever. If anything, it reliably signals "cheap".

Apocryphon 16d ago
There's a recent meme of AI-generated representations of food being notably unappetizing, even grotesque and repulsive: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ai-restaurant-food-images https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ai-restaurant-food-images
phil21 16d ago
I think there is a big difference between using AI generated food pictures, vs. taking real pictures of your food and using AI to create a menu/poster. The former is both weird, creepy most of the time, and false advertising. The latter is as you say - the state of the current status quo. I can tell that it's AI, but honestly it's just replacing low-effort human crud for low-effort AI crud. Doesn't bother me at all, it's actually a great use for the technology imo.
- quietsegfault 16d ago
  What about the pictures of Chinese food above the counter vs. the actual food you get? There has ALWAYS been a big difference between advertisements and menus and what the food really looks like.
  - phil21 16d ago
    Funnily enough, I was thinking of exactly those photos when writing my comment. I never found them to be all that misrepresentative - that they took a photo from their family friend of their father taken 20 years ago for the same dish they are making me and have it on some faded menu board behind the counter is... honestly pretty close. It's the fake AI generated "shine" I guess that is the difference to me. Obviously totally made up, not real food, and made to look pretty. It's mostly the uncanny valley. Both are indeed false advertising, but the AI generated ones are so obviously made up and not real it's a little off putting to me. Wouldn't really stop me from ordering if I were already there, but it might make me order from their competitor if I were on Uber Eats or whatnot.

kamaal 16d ago

>>I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction. Im in India, ordered a bed from a carpenter, a week later he made a great a bed. He took pictures, and used some AI magic had it put it in more grand rooms. He posted it on his Instagram and Facebook feeds. The next day when I went to him to have it delivered to my place, he showed me he had received lots of offers to make the same bed for other people and his order book was full for the next few months. Until the robots actually arrive to do his work, AI in many way is going to a huge positive for him. Its going to be the same case for many many such people.

pseudohadamard 16d ago

> The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious; Whereas with non-AI-generated food pics you know that the McPlastic burger you order will look exactly, totally, 100% like the one in the photo.

johnofthesea 16d ago
And your point is ...?
- threatofrain 16d ago
  We were feasting on lies. Rather than demand honesty our instincts instead reach for a deathly sort of deliciousness. Anyways what was your point in the discussion?
  - ryandrake 16d ago
    We'd rather have the artisanal hand-crafted lies of the past than today's AI-generated lies.