Restaurants using AI for food menu is a sign of bad quality.
The best pizza I ever had was from a hole-in-the-wall place in Montreal with a layer of grease in the windows, thick cobwebs covered in dead flies, and an air-conditioner black with mold.
If anyone cares, or remembers, it was Rock And Roll Pizza on Bleury, where the Spectrum used to be. In front of the NYKS.
It was a Persian guy running the place. One day I convinced a Persian co-worker to eat there. I guess he gave shit to the owner because the next day the place was a lot cleaner.
Basically they made some kind of shawarma pizza that was out of this world.
Oh and the business next door sold sex dolls, there was a fully inflated transexual doll in that window.
I miss that Montreal. I don’t like the crappy generic condo abomination that’s there now.
So anyways, if greasy windows and dead spiders didn’t turn me off, what does it say that seeing some generic gross AI art turns me off?
(I just remembered another MTL pizza place with greasy windows and dead flies that was so amazing a guy drove from the South Shore just to eat there.)
It’s like when I go to vendor halls at conventions and half the vendors are repackaged aliexpress/temu items
It’s like when I go to
vendor halls at conventions and half the vendorsany store that’s not a mega-department store all the items are repackaged aliexpress/temu itemsftfy
TBH, the US has been middle-manning economically depressed labor for cheap goods for decades. It just turns out that China is way better at it than we are.
Alibaba/express just made it a marketplace where companies could do it with zero friction.
It’s still a local business so why abandon that because no one there has the creative ability to make “cool” looking ads?
AI for the masses means they can “draw” stuff, even without any artistic ability.
You might mention your dislike of their using AI - and offer your artistic services instead. Shunning business because of their lack of creative ability is kind of silly… made even worse if their product is good and what you want.
Nah, it’s a testament to no matter what you do, some people would rather be miserable and “make a statement” than to just forget the damn ai art and go inside the damn restaurant.
Why doesn’t the owner just forget the AI AND TAKE A FUCKING PICTURE OF THE FOOD THEY’RE MAKING ???
I’ve been to plenty of restaurants THAT TAKE PHOTOS OF THEIR FOOD and it’s just as capable of being bad than if it was ai. Stay mad though, I’m sure it’ll change because of your anger.
???
Baffling response. The point is none of this AI cancer is necessary.
While I agree with the whole ai is ruining shit argument, I’m just saying I’m not going to punish a LOCAL MOM AND POP SHOP for using AI. Instead of boycotting them, why not talk to them about why AI is bad and offer to make their damn menu for them. Instead you pack up your chairs and say Nope! And then go complain about it behind a screen. DO SOMETHING rather than SAYING SOMETHING.
Ahh “the customer is always wrong” motto…
…also, your image of others as “people who prefer to be miserable” rather than people who prefer hand made art, or art that hasn’t been stolen and used for profit by billionaires, or art that wasn’t created by polluting the planet… Is it’s self, a miserable illusion of others.
So you, yourself are choosing the miserable viewpoint.
Personally I’m glad people have a sense of justice, and pay attention to the news and care about issues of morality and climate survival.
I like people fighting billionaires, and fighting for the environment. I think they’re great, and that your view point - is the flawed and weaker one.
Miserable meaning you just HAD to post something about it. I’m all for fighting billionaires, BUT TYPING IN ALL CAPS AT AN ONLINE STRANGER ISN’T FIGHTING BILLIONAIRES.
By people not supporting businesses who use AI instead of creating jobs for humans? No I’m not bothered by that at all.
it’s a vicious circle.
It’s worse when their menu pictures have the glitch where it makes things look like triptaphobia? I forget how it’s spelled and I’m not going to look it up for obvious reasons…
That’s what you get when you use ai to upscale ai images.
It’s like they all use one model that can’t figure out french fries, hash browns, or lettuce.
This place has a $35 crab cake sandwich on the menu and can’t manage to take a picture of the fucking thing.
Trypophobia? Went to a restaurant that had ai menu pictures that looked like everything was made of bugs. They looked absolutely disgusting. At that point it wasn’t even about not liking ai, i simply lost my apetite looking at it.
That’s the one. Same reaction. They’re lucky I didn’t puke lol
Oh yeah like it generates the images all roughly textured? I think it’s like a reaction to generated images usually looking too smooth, but they just ended up deep frying them in uncanny.
Their artistic skills have nothing to do with their culinary skills.
Then don’t put up ai art. Just put up a text menu.
Or marketing skills, or getting a feel for the room.
Can I pay with an AI picture of a credit card?
Willingness to put time and effort into understanding the experience the customer wants.
Recently saw an AI photobooth. No one was using it, they were taking their own pictures instead.
Why the fuck would I pay you to stick a prompt in when I could do it myself if I really wanted an AI generated picture? You may have cut some of your costs, but now your final product has no value to it.
That’s the thing that really gets me about these folks.
You slop up something for yourself and you are happy with it, ok.
But then you expect me to engage/pay for your zero-effort AI output that I could have just gotten myself direct from the same place you did? Why?
What’s an AI photobooth? I’m just imagining a booth where you have your photo taken and it prints a totally unrelated AI-generated photo. Like, you go for a passport photo and get a picture of Marie Curie and the Hulk windsurfing on the Moon.
Your imagination of it is pretty spot on tbh
There’s a shop near me that has one of those sandwich board signs on the sidewalk with some sort of “fuck the billionaires, support small businesses” messaging, but for some idiotic reason, it has the faces of those billionaires on it, so every time I see it, I just get angry.
Supporting a small business with an AI Poster is much better than supporting a big corporation
Why? Isn’t the small business supporting a big AI corporation? So a big corporation is getting supported either way?
Small businesses aren’t inherently cool and good, many of them would prefer to be large corporations, they just don’t know how to get there.
Creating an AI Poster might literally just be one month of some $5 AI sub or a free trial. There’s no way to verify how much they’re actually supporting the AI Company.
And while your second point is valid, if you really cared about supporting local you’d simply do some research on which local businesses are running with a community-centric approach. Which ones are run by decent people. Etc. That will likely but not definitely exclude businesses that use AI anyway.
I’d also just rather support a local shithead than a billionaire shithead 🤷
If they generate AI slop, they’re supporting the big corporations.
Edit: damn, that’s a lot of AI bros trying to make themselves feel better with “nuance” and “lesser evil” arguments down in the comments. I guess if you don’t see your money directly go to OpenAI, it helps you sleep at night better. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.
You can get an AI Poster created for negligible amount of money. Maybe even a free trial.
Unless you’ve verified somehow that that company uses AI in abundance and not just a few posters, you’re just making assumptions.
If they use AI for a few posters, where’s the guarantee that they will actually put effort into their main job? The kind of person that cheaps out by using AI is not the one I want to be paying.
Again, you’re just making assumptions.
They may or may not be accurate assumptions, but if they change your decision making to instead shop at mega-corp instead of local, they’re ultimately harmful assumptions imo.
Believe it or not, not everyone is keen on sloppifying everything they do. Local businesses that don’t use AI exist. And you can help by not normalizing the slop.
Either you support small business directly and large corporations indirectly or you just support large corporations directly or you walk out in to the middle of the woods, withdraw from society, and homestead. There is not way to participate in today’s society without indirectly supporting corporations.
Sure, feel free to go in to every small shop and argue with them why they should not use AI. But supporting a multiple small shops that use AI for posters is better than giving all your money to Walmart.
This statement is the correct option.
Supporting a small business with an AI Poster is much better than supporting a big corporation.
Or I find a small shop that doesn’t use AI and support them. And if you think they don’t exist any more, well, you helped make that happen.
You get to pick the hill that you die on, but what I am saying is even if they don’t use AI - they still use bookkeeping software, they still file taxes, they still order supplies, they have an email, website and someplace they store documents.
So AI can be your hill that is fine, but you are still picking the lesser evil in other ways. As you said, “I guess if you don’t see your money directly go to OpenAI, it helps you sleep at night better. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.”
Yeah so small business without AI slop is clearly better, it’s just that small business with AI slop still supports big business less than you supporting big business directly.
Does it, though? Small business still has more money to throw to corporations than individual people.
A small business with an AI poster is still better than a big business with an AI poster.
And you czn be sure those big businesses are using way more AI
Yes, getting stabbed in the arm is better than getting stabbed in the throat. Doesn’t mean I should go and get stabbed in the arm.
My reasoning was that when you buy from a big business, then 100% of what you spend goes there, while less than 100% of your spending go to big business if you buy from a small business that supports big businesses itself.
It doesn’t make sense to compare the total amount a small business contributes to a big business with the total amount an individual person contributes, unless you have some further factors you think I have failed to take into account.
Why wouldn’t it make sense? If I want to minimize the amount of support corporate LLMs get, it absolutely makes sense to stop endorsing other businesses that use it.
The original claim I made was that supporting small business is better than directly supporting big businesses. You are 100% right about minimising the amount corporate LLMs get, it’s just that your responding to my comparison of small business vs big business. What you want to do is to support neither of them, so I wouldn’t really spend more time analysing what I said since I don’t think it’s relevant to you.
Yes, I don’t really support this “lesser evil” type argument, since both options in the end proliferate corporate slop. If a business can’t exist without using corporate LLMs, it shouldn’t exist.
Because in addition to already running your own business, you should also be a ad exec and a artist.
Listen fuck the ai industry and what its doing, but can we fuck off with hating on the people who use it for what its worth right now?
Edit, to be clear, fuck off and suck a dick to everyone who replied to me.
No, we cant. I would rather see just plain times new roman text than that slop. Especially if its food related
If you’re too lazy to photograph the food you produce day in and day out, I don’t wanna find out where else you’ll cut corners. It doesn’t take much effort to pop a plate on a cutting board or white poster board and snap a shot with your phone.
Because in addition to already running your own business, you should also be a ad exec and a artist.
That’s what running your own business is. You do as much as possible by yourself so you don’t have to share the profits. What would these people have done before AI? They would have had to figure it out. And their solution—whatever it was—would have been more tasteful than AI slop.
The slop poster isn’t really replacing an ‘ad exec’, so it’s about ‘artist’.
A common scenario people have posted is when they GenAI up some food pictures. Given they could have snapped pictures of the food they cook with a cell phone pretty much instantly, this particularly doesn’t inspire confidence in their food.
Related is if they GenAI up their menu, then it can get confusing/weird as the content sometimes doesn’t quite match what the restauraunt actually does. Which makes me realize how lazy they are about accuracy.
The other case I’ve seen is them using image gen to put out a ‘mascot’ character. I suppose this is less critically on point, but compared to someone who skipped the ‘mascot’ gimmick altogether or someone who at least charmingly made an attempt, it’s a bit of a turn-off.
If they were using it for what it’s good at, we wouldn’t be upset.
This is french fries and coleslaw and crab cake sando with lettuce.
A business can log into the free version of Canva, type in what they want and come out with 90 different templates for their marketing and flyers.
I hate even more that I get there and they tell me “you know you can get it cheaper on Amazon” or “we no longer stock it but you can get it on Amazon”. Bud, I can get every single thing in your store on Amazon and yes, it is often cheaper but I am trying to keep local stores and local jobs alive.
This happened to me a few weeks ago when I was looking through thrift shops to put together a Halloween costume. I went looking store to store for overalls, asked the employees if they had any suggestions. The elderly ladies had legit suggestions (that simply didn’t work out for me), but the young staff just went, “Try Amazon?”
The sad truth is, the youngin’s never lived in a world without Amazon. They don’t know the local stores like the older folks do. Perhaps they’ve never gone from thrift store to thrift store looking for treasures (even if they work in a thrift store.) It’s possible the idea of “avoiding Amazon” has never occurred to them.
employees justifiably hate their employers
and small businesses typically abuse their employees far worse than mega corps which is saying something in a world of Walmarts and Amazon’s
the sweet spot is a company that’s small enough to maintain a culture and the owners still have a vision but big enough they have to follow the rules pay taxes and have an hr department
of course there is no ethical consumption or production under capitalism but I didn’t create this world just suffering along with everyone else
Sweet spot is shops that require staff with some level of skills or knowledge which makes them a bit more difficult to replace.
If I see AI posters, menus, or signage, I don’t spend money. Period.
Surely, these small business owners won’t throw a fit when consumers choose Amazon over their shop. After all, it’s cheaper and more convenient, right?
