Santa Cruz restaurant changes logo after flurry of negative reviews for AI art

Seems valid to me. I won't read articles with model-generated header images, because it's a good indicator the rest of the text will be slop as well.

For a restaurant, a slop logo gives the impression that the owner doesn't care about the details and has no taste.

Beyond that, the use of generative models is a big moral issue for a growing number of people.

1) Because the people who contributed to the development of those other processes received fair market value for their work (for the most part). The vast majority of contributors to the process that made this logo have not been compensated for their work. This differential can lead to an ethical judgement about the process, which can transitively be applied to the logo made with the process, and the restaurant as a whole.

2) Some automated processes lower the quality of outcomes. Microwaving food might be a faster/cheaper way to cook, but customers might criticize the results.

3) Some processes can be viewed as having lower value compared to others, independent of result quality. This is particularly common in the art and service industries, for which the logo of a restaurant is very much at the intersection.

a lot of people on here are going to instantly defend any AI use in spite of the specifics but the over-abundance of blatant diffusion model art in cost-cutting nowadays, in places where it isn’t even expected, is ridiculous. marketing is by no means the peak of artistic endeavor but genai logos for small business street taco vendors, coffee shops reek of laziness. never mind the inundation of places like Etsy and Redbubble where it is getting increasingly less possible to find stuff made with human intention. shades of the anti-materialism of the 90s: now consumer products are all just generated, never made.

there is this coffee shop in downtown Seattle, Artly coffee, that operates on this gimmick of serving robot-produced coffee. a 20 year old employee hangs in the back to essentially do nothing and sit on their phone. it is a silly experience worth trying once, but no more. Coffee by itself is already a cross section into the hyperindustrial production that has informed the trajectory of our lives since before being born, but i feel regardless there are such things that are a step too far

    What is it that makes this different?

That the artists don't get paid anymore.

Nobody likes picturing a world without art, and if nobody gets paid to make art... where does the art come from?

Nobody likes thinking where this trend goes. If we automate all the jobs away... everyone will starve.

Laziness and cost cutting, the generated logo doesn’t even look good.

A logo is quite literally one of the first things you see, it informs your first impression of a company. If they really care so little about that: then it does follow that they also care little about food standards, quality ingredients and paying their chefs/waiters appropriately. All of this leading to a poor experience.

A bit of artistic inspiration is fine, not everything has to be the pinnacle of design: but you know what? Those blatant mcdonalds logo ripoff logos or “falafel king” don’t inspire confidence either.