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Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

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Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#81

Post by oeitho »

joshstrange wrote: post #67
oeitho wrote: post #40

I'm starting to see more and more generated images of food at restaurants where I live, but I'm happy to say that its still somewhat rare. My partner and I usually just give a one star review each on Google when we pass by a place like this and then carry on.

Just so I have this clear, you rate a restaurant badly based on the pictures of the food and not the taste/flavor/etc? These places are doing their best to compete in a cutthroat environment with often razor-thin margins but you are willing to write them off and actively try to harm them for reaching for a tool to try and meet consumer's ever-increasing expectations? Just like in the native vs electron debate it's no…

Yes.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#82

Post by account42 »

joshstrange wrote: post #67
oeitho wrote: post #40

I'm starting to see more and more generated images of food at restaurants where I live, but I'm happy to say that its still somewhat rare. My partner and I usually just give a one star review each on Google when we pass by a place like this and then carry on.

Just so I have this clear, you rate a restaurant badly based on the pictures of the food and not the taste/flavor/etc? These places are doing their best to compete in a cutthroat environment with often razor-thin margins but you are willing to write them off and actively try to harm them for reaching for a tool to try and meet consumer's ever-increasing expectations? Just like in the native vs electron debate it's no…

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.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#83

Post by qingcharles »

simonw wrote: post #69
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds? A cursory glance at YouGov strongly suggests that people have bad vibes about AI in basically every territory where they're asked about it, and for basically every use-case

How many of the people who answer polls like that also have the ability to look at a poster and instantly clock that it was AI-generated?

Almost none, sadly. Most of the population just doesn't have that skill, which is why places like Facebook are just reams of AI Jesus upvoted to the Moon.

I saw this menu online the other day, and it's not even discernable from the photo what the food products are; it even sets off trypophobia:

https://imgur.com/a/YvyRjts

But people are still ordering it.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#85

Post by XorNot »

diabllicseagull wrote: post #37

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.

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.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#86

Post by qingcharles »

mjhay wrote: post #44
hei-lima wrote: post #24

I live in Brazil, and on our delivery apps (like iFood), AI photos have become a plague. It's so bad seeing pictures with that distinct GPT look. You just don't know what your rice and beans will look like.

In the US, some of those apps were generating gross nonsense like showing an image of a pizza with a sweet pie filling (because the menu said “pizza pie”). I don’t get how AI images like this don’t open them up to false advertising lawsuits

This one is really disturbing because I can't tell what the food is even supposed to be without looking at the words, plus trypophobia:

https://imgur.com/a/YvyRjts

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#87

Post by andrewflnr »

simonw wrote: post #69
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds? A cursory glance at YouGov strongly suggests that people have bad vibes about AI in basically every territory where they're asked about it, and for basically every use-case

How many of the people who answer polls like that also have the ability to look at a poster and instantly clock that it was AI-generated?

They don't care, because it's only tangentially about the concrete output. It's about the hollowing of human communication and creativity.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#88

Post by vunderba »

simonw wrote: post #64
tgv wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising Tale as old as time: a race to the bottom. Businesses trying to cut corners, thinking they can offset it against losses from exiting customers. If it wasn't, a lot will just cut more corners.

I don't think it's a corner cutting thing though. These businesses weren't paying someone to make a flier. The business owner was sweating for an hour in Microsoft Word and producing something that looked terrible. I expect they are now investing approximately the same about of time iterating in ChatGPT and producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.

I called it out a while ago but the largest market to get destroyed by gen AI was never the professional market - it was the gig economy.

The quality of generative AI may not be top-notch, but it presents an easy drop-in replacement for one-off tasks that people previously outsourced to platforms like Fiverr (voiceovers, logo design, clip art, copy editing, translation, etc).

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#89

Post by kleene_op »

oeitho wrote: post #40

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.

That's the definition of judging a book by its cover. Maybe they don't care about spending money on design and just want to focus on the food they serve, you'll never know. I would also probably be less inclined to enter a restaurant if I saw generated images advertising the food as opposed to real ones. But I would never ever dare put a one star review without even having been a customer there in the first place. I would remove 2 stars at most from a 5 stars review, if the food and service was impeccable but they ruined the settings with AI.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#90

Post by simonw »

joshstrange wrote: post #75
simonw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a corner cutting thing though. These businesses weren't paying someone to make a flier. The business owner was sweating for an hour in Microsoft Word and producing something that looked terrible. I expect they are now investing approximately the same about of time iterating in ChatGPT and producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.

This. I said it elsewhere in this thread differently but people want to pretend the options are: 1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster OR 2. Use AI It's not, the money is often just not there to pay someone. So you get whatever the intern or the owner can slap together in whatever tool they know best (which is rarely the best tool for the job). It's completely understandable that they would re…

What's weird here is that I should be in total agreement with you.

I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well.

For the fliers I'm talking about here (think a hardware store promoting their summer sale) I don't think the impact on the local poster design community is meaningful.

And yet... the resulting posters put me off. I'm trying to figure out why that is. I think the best explanation I have is the lack of intention behind them - knowing that none of the visual details - the illustrations, the typographic flair - had anyone thinking about them while they were constructed.

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