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?
Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
141–150 of 322 posts
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#142The 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…
People have posted prolific artists, called it AI, and had everyone hating them until the big reveal. So to be frank, it probably is in your head.
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Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#143I'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.…
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Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not an argument, it's an open question: do people who express a dislike of AI know when they see a poster that was generated with assistance from AI?
I meant to ask what the point of the question is basically. What would change, what would it matter for, if the answer was yes or no? Besides it being so general a question to really be useless as anything but an insinuation IMO, which is why I'm trying to tease that insinuation out. E.g. are people who use Apple left-handed? Are they gay? The answer is "yes, some of them, of course, but also many aren't... why are y…
OK, my point here is that a YouGov poll about people's attitude to AI may not tell us anything actionable about how people feel about AI posters - it depends on how good they are at detecting them.
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#145The 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…
People have posted prolific artists, called it AI, and had everyone hating them until the big reveal. So to be frank, it probably is in your head.
Art has never been about the objective quality of the work
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#146The 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.
The obvious answer is because the old, crudely drawn sign did (and to go deeper, you'd have to ask the janitor who drew it.) Now it's become completely detached from its origin and pointless.
The only reason this question is answerable is because the poster saw the old sign. When everybody is gone who saw the old sign, they'll just continue doing it for no reason. When somebody asks about it, some creep will babble about Chesterton's Fence.
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#147I 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.
Not caring is the middle ground.
Only if there were a group of people who were angrily repelled by non-AI things.
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#148I'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.…
I was talking to my daughter a few weeks ago about a coffee shop that was opening soon and I said that based on the posters in the window it probably wouldn’t be very good. She didn’t really understand how I could draw that conclusion and I explained that you could tell that they had been stretched to fit the available dimensions in a way that clearly distorted the images and text. And that like… if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things.
And I think it’s ultimately the same sort of thing? If in your marketing materials you don’t value craft and you take the shortest path rather than embrace your constraints and produce something good within them, then that’s maybe a negative signal about how you treat the thing you actually do.
IME the people I know who embody great craft in a field… they care about it in everything they do, and they don’t do a thing unless they can do it with care. I think sloppy AI is just a very strong signal of someone who doesn’t follow that.
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#149Earlier 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.
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…
> ... 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.
Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
#150If 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…
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!