Hand-made comfort food will be as much a luxury as hand-made menus.
Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
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Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#12There are a lot of these on websites too. There was a design that was pretty good back in the day, but lately I've been getting quite a few requests to change it to the trendy Linear-style AI design. As more sites use AI-generated images, I think some people have come to see that as the trend
Remember "Hey Look, It's Every Bootstrap Website Ever"? http://www.dagusa.com/
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#13My 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.
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#14I do miss tacky, over-styled menus sometimes. Doesn't excuse the fake food pictures though.
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#15There are a lot of these on websites too. There was a design that was pretty good back in the day, but lately I've been getting quite a few requests to change it to the trendy Linear-style AI design. As more sites use AI-generated images, I think some people have come to see that as the trend
Remember "Hey Look, It's Every Bootstrap Website Ever"? http://www.dagusa.com/
Yes, exactly. Bootstrap homogenized layout, and now AI seems to be homogenizing both layout and imagery at the same time.
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#16AI 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 do…
Except sometimes cheap places are great because the food is good and they don't spend money on ambience and other pretentious expenditures.
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#17I think the Japanese laws requiring strict truth in food advertising would be a good transplant.
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#18We 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.
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#19I'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…
Perhaps in part Berkson’s paradox in action? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#20We always expect what was promised to be different than what was delivered to some degree, but I'm not sure restaurants have fully weighed the expectations-vs-reality backlash this may cause... uncannily-wrong details aside for a sec, the AI pics always set michelin-level presentation expectations. The final promise-vs-plate pics in this post were pretty dramatic.
There's always a class of restaurants where they don't care about repeat visitors. Think the cafe in front of a major tourist attraction: every day brings a new busload of 1-time patrons, those will always want the michelin-level pics to bait the 1-time foot-traffic in. The danger is the neighborhood mom-and-pops will start using the same trick without understanding they need repeat customers, and repeat disappointment kills a repeat audience.
But who knows... people with a TV budget have been using glue in their cheesy pizza commercials, soap in their beer glass foam, and motor oil on their pancake stacks for a long time -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k7PJoNAXkk -- maybe this is just equalizing the enshittified food playing field.