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Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

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Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#111

Post by dinfinity »

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…

Lost me at the last paragraph. Comparing billion dollar companies to small businesses does not make sense.

The real reason for Electron apps being a thing is that there is very little competition where they are used. If chatting applications could properly communicate with each other based on international standards instead of being silos, nobody in their right mind would use the trash clients that Slack and Whatsapp produce, for instance.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#112

Post by akomtu »

dev0p wrote: post #48

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 resembli…

I think AI pictures have this soulless vibe because they are creations of Frankenstein: many pieces of other pictures stitched together in a sloppy manner. A human-made picture, even a bad one, is made by outlining an idea and the presence if this idea behind a picture is what gives it a soul, figuratively speaking.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#113

Post by visarga »

jodacola wrote: post #60
simonw wrote: post #30

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.…

My perspective on this, as someone skeptical of (but also bullish on) AI, is complex and I haven't completely nailed it down. My knee-jerk reaction is instant credibility loss for the business/person/thing. Follow-on is sadness (what are we losing in society because of this?), and curiosity: if a polished appearance (even if it is mega plastic) is no longer a sign of quality, then what is? What signals do I need to l…

> if a polished appearance (even if it is mega plastic) is no longer a sign of quality, then what is? What signals do I need to look for now?

AI produces apparent uniformity, it makes it harder to distinguish the quality of the underlying process. Same thing happens in all fields, we are all harder to differentiate, then why would you pick me over the others? this is the hard question we are facing now, and it's a desperate situation to be in. Not just artists and people looking for a job, but also companies to their investors and products to customers. All harder to tell apart.

I think this drives a lot of the AI craze. If I can't own my niche anymore, what is my new specialization? We have no answers yet. We have seen this kind of total competition in a domain with cheap imitation in SEO and slop writing.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#115

Post by _joel »

ericpauley wrote: post #103
abrugsch wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks like every kebab shop menu near me. All offerings crudely cut/pasted/mashed together. 5 near me literally have the same menu with different prices and a colour theme to match their (usually terrible, 3-D font effect from 90's era Corel Draw) Logo. And they were like that BEFORE GenAI got popular!

This brought back fond memories of my favorite kebab cart in college. Looked back at their cart on Google Maps and some of the menu items are just the same image stretched differently.

small, medium and large.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#116

Post by sillyfluke »

mathw wrote: post #55
dev0p wrote: post #48

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 resembli…

Also why do they have sea life in it at all, surely that's not something that's meant to be in the pool.

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.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#117

Post by customguy »

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?

What's the argument here? People don't like spit in their food, how many people can tell their food got spat in? Does that mean they're somehow wrong or to be belittled for not liking spit in their food?

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#118

Post by customguy »

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.

To me nothing a human makes has the capacity to be as terrible on an existential level as genAI slop.

> something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them

Of course they think it's great, or they wouldn't be doing it. That goes for everyone, with anything, ever. And some customers probably think it's great, too. But if you want me as a customer, to whom all those other opinions are completely irrelevant, you'd be better off just putting a turd glazed with boogers. Doesn't matter what it advertises, I'll know a human made this, and look at the product description.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#119

Post by customguy »

joshstrange wrote: post #99
simonw wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 figur…

I guess I see very little "soul" in most marketing/advertising in the first place. It was slop well before LLMs entered the scene. If my local hardware store wants to put up a poster for their summer sale I don't care if it's black comic sans on white paper or if it's a AI-generated advertisement. Either way I'm not looking that closely at it and neither version were going to show up in an art museum or recieve desig…

> LLMs are currently in a category where people can have visceral reaction and claim "I'd never buy something from a company that does that" but I can tell you right now that won't last.

Because people are struggling to make ends meet as wealth gets more and more concentrated. It reminds me of that really disgusting joke: why do sheep farmers like to fuck their sheep just at the edge of a cliff? Because they push back.

So yeah, people often make choices they'd rather not make. Doesn't mean anything, just like that sheep doesn't love the farmer and is grinding up against him, it doesn't want to fall of a cliff and die.

And these companies take a few cherry picked snapshots, never show the video, never show the aftermath, and brag about acceptance. Fuck all of that, so much.

People don't want all of humanity to be stolen from by companies who then turn around and sue you if you violate their copyright. That settles all of it, already. All this stuff about quality and economics is irrelevant. We hate people who steal from the little man to enrich the wealthy, always did, always will. Where there is a "we" that isn't just isolated people playing pretend, you will find this as the bedrock, maybe a layer above hating child abuse. And making the "accept child abuse or robber barons" option 10%, 20%, 50000% cheaper doesn't change that in the slightest.

I'll go you one further: the very few ones who do, or don't care, don't matter, because when it comes to ethics and society they already checked out, and can stay checked out. They got old, they lost what they were supposed to hold on to if they ever had it, and that's tragic, but mostly their problem which they want to extend onto the people who don't have it.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#120

Post by alamortsubite »

square_usual wrote: post #56
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-…

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.
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