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Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

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Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#151

Post by gtowey »

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?

I agree with others saying that this doesn't disqualify complaints.

In fact, it can be precisely because they can't tell the difference that they would be concerned about consuming AI outputs when they don't know they are. If someone wants to take a stand and only read human text and human art then we may need regulation to add notices when text and images are LLM outputs.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#152

Post by bayesnet »

I buy rice from an online store that carries speciality Japanese varieties. The rice is very good.

But this year they replaced their previously obviously-English-as-second-language-but-informative descriptions with just total slop that say absolutely nothing at all about the rice you’re buying. Every description is just platitudes about how good the rice is.

So as in TFA we get people who seemingly can’t resist “pressing the button” and getting nice shiny results even if they aren’t, like, good. It’s nuts. FWIW I emailed the rice shop and politely asked them to revert to the old descriptions but received no reply.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#153

Post by joegibbs »

GPT-Image has that horrible deep-fried look to it. Can't draw anything without looking like it's got grit thrown over the whole image. Nano Banana is much, much better here, it's often hard to tell if it's fake.

Apart from that image generation is just the wrong idea for flyers since the resolution they put out is never enough for 300 DPI, the image always looks low-quality, the edges of the text are blurry and so on. Also the fact that the images in the picture look nothing like the real thing is unethical.

I think you could have an AI system that makes menus correctly: the restaurant would take (amateur) pictures of all their menu items, give the system the names, descriptions, prices and so on, then the agent could use Nano Banana or something like that to give the images consistent lighting and angles, use a different model to remove the backgrounds and then write a menu in the desired sizes using HTML. That way the text could be perfect, the images could look like what you actually get.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#154

Post by Marsymars »

cautiouscat wrote: post #97
gegtik wrote: post #3

I do think that AI signage/advertising is the new signifier of low-effort, low-skill output and that is how it will be perceived by clientele. Similar to someone just scrawling a sandwich board sign in chalk (which at this point I would prefer). Businesses will stand out from a taste perspective by continuing to hire human effort to make recognisable human output.

> Similar to someone just scrawling a sandwich board sign in chalk As opposed to what? This is usually a sign of quality. If it’s in chalk it’s because it changes as the restaurant experiments and tries new things.

Yeah, there’s a great bar I sometimes go to where the taplist is a chalkboard because of their ~20 taps they’re typically changing at least one per day to a new keg.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#156

Post by Marsymars »

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…

> Just like in the native vs electron debate it's not "Beautiful hand-crafted native app" or "Electron wasteful trash", it's "Electron or nothing".

The overwhelming majority of the total uses of Electron apps are going to be the same pile of apps from various megacorps that could fund native apps with change from their couch cushions.

e.g. the sum total of Electron apps I use are Teams (I guess not quite Electron now, but close enough)/Slack/Discord/Android Messages/VS Code.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#157

Post by tortilla »

qingcharles wrote: post #86
mjhay wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Great vibes. Great times."

Every restaurant/bar in my area has that phrase in their AI flyers.

"All slop. All shit."

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#158

Post by ryandrake »

qingcharles wrote: post #83
simonw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. For most people I've talked to, when this topic comes up, they'll tell me they don't like AI, but then cannot really identify it. Especially the elderly folks in my neighborhood. You look at their facebook feeds and it's 100% slop. No joke. Every. Single. Post. Is. AI. Slop. And for the most part they can't tell.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#159

Post by chupchap »

Restaurants used to have stock images everywhere from menus, to flyers, and posters. I don't remember much talk about it to the extent we have with AI generated images. I prefer to judge restaurants on the quality and taste of food, unless they're charging me a fine-dining rate for it.

Re: Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

#160

Post by ryandrake »

simonw wrote: post #90
joshstrange wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 figur…

> 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.

I think that's exactly it, and it's not really hard to articulate. You are simply noticing the lack of effort, lack of care, and lack of craftsmanship that is inherent in AI-produced slop. This isn't mysticism and it doesn't take a sixth sense to detect. When someone puts no effort into creating something, that lack of effort carries through the entire work, and is (or should be) obvious and easy to spot.

Ask a schoolteacher. They can spot when someone half-asses a term paper, and, at least I hope, they can spot AI slop term papers.

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