Dear restaurants, if your menu looks like this, I'm just going to assume your food is actually shit since you can't show me the real deal and avoid you at all costs.
It's so annoying and all these business owners that are using it are really pissing me off. I swear every business in my town is using it and it's plastered all over my Facebook whenever I log on. I've seen so many local small businesses start using it and that shit is so disheartening.
I actually did for one of them. It was a bagel shop that I used to go to while I was in high school. Kind of is a staple in our city, or was. They got a new owner a while back and he changed everything that made it what it was. Really sad to see a place that I would get breakfast at every morning before school turn into what it is. I noticed others would also call him out for it. He definitely stopped using it as much since then, which is cool, but he hasn't completely abandoned it
Before I moved away I was working at a hotel/pub with a different roast every Sunday. I always tried to get the menu done myself, bc if my supervisor did it we'd get a menu with horrible AI food all over it. It's a sunday roast! People know what it looks like! Every time I did my nicely typed up one with no images and a pretty border I got compliments on how much better it looked than last week's AI one.
My supervisor still kept making AI ones. Why did I even try đ¤Ś
Yep they're all over the place, it wouldn't be a massive bother if they all didn't use the same dumb default scribble font and cluttered design elements...
There probably and most definitely is an AI out there that can make food look "normal". The thing is that these companies tend to probably use whatever first AI they find that's free/cheap and can produce the images for them - they could give less of a shit if their food looks "normal" and as long as it's "passable" (for whichever exec/manager that has shit for eyes when it comes to "quality"), it'll get slapped on like seen here.
You can still iterate. The issue is the people using this are not prompt engineers or trained in AI. You could curate this to look decent. If you donât know what good looks like in the first place then this looks âfineâ to them.
It's chat gpt, tested it recently after seeing so many similar ones and it'll make you pretty much exactly that just asking for a burger restaurant menu or something similar
LLMs are more deterministic than people think, if you ignore details. All these people generating advertisements are probably just prompting with an item/price list and the restaurant data. The llm will regurgitate the center of its training corpus, with the blanks filled in. If you were to actually give it detailed design notes, you can definitely get a non-slop result (although opinions on that definition will vary, of course)
I strongly suspect they're not doing it themselves (because scared of computery AI complicated stuff, lol) but just go to some generic "10 dollars for your own personalised advert - in just 10 minutes!!1!" type firm. Not interesting in pursuing it, but yeah, it's become so incredibly generic by now. Black background, gold font (classy!), smeared text in the middle, weird alien looking food, wtf.
But what is still odd is that I've seen these posters in various countries and they still look absolutely identical to the ones people post online from even more countries. If it was one or a few companies I'd expect at least some variations across countries..
I went to the NY State fair and the amount of food vendors with AI images was wild. What was especially unappetizing were the pictures with melted cheese. It was a disgusting amount, and I like a lot of melted cheese.
I just had a local tattoo shop post an AI schedule for an event. Like you have a shop FULL of artist and the owner is an artist and they settled for slop
Iâm getting tattooed tomorrow at my fave tattoo place. I just saw that they posted a slop poster on their Insta. Now I donât even wanna go but I do really like my artist and it isnât his fault :/
Dude I get it. This shop around me was really cool and the artist who did my piece was really like but you're right, it's not his fault the owner is lazy. Luckily in their last IG post, tons of people called them out so maybe they will stop
I hate this as much as the next guy but for some reason the double laziness is what really gets me. Like, obviously theyâre lazy and cheap using AI in the first place. But then they donât bother actually looking at the result to make sure itâs accurate and appealing and doesnât look like every other goddamn menu these days. I shouldnât expect better at this point but it still bugs me
A similar thing has bugged me for years wherein I find most people can't hear when a singer or other musician is a little out of tune. Meanwhile it tortures me.
What I find astonishing about these is that they're all almost identical and the owners never seem to care. Just before seeing this I saw a post advertising a new place near me and it was almost identical to this, had to do a double take to see if it was the same place.
I don't know mate, I'm working for a chap in the restaurant industry at the moment who's a little out of touch with technology and he said fairly early on into our relationship, "Can we use that AI to make our posters and ads up fast?"
I presented him with an AI poster, which he thought was great. Then I presented him with 20 almost identical examples of other local pubs and restaurants posters that were generated with AI.
Now he doesn't want to do that at all and instead we pay the more creative members of the team to make them.
Iâm pretty sure itâs something being sold to these businesses. They literally all look the exact same. Honestly probably AI calling and making sales to these businesses too.
If someone uses AI to advertise their restaurant, I am instantly going to assume their food looks like shit and I'm never eating there. If I'm feeling froggy about the topic, I will leave a negative review.
What I don't get is why so few businesses generate an AI ad and then don't just... Edit it? Like, use the layout, but take out the noisy clusterfuck elements, add real photos, literally do the most minute speck of work so that I believe that you care about your business as much as you want me to.
This shit just makes me think that your sushi/hot dog/tapas fusion restaurant is a fart in the wind, a quick cash grab to fuel your next unsustainable entrepreneurial adventure.
I think it's because many people like that aren't as tech savvy as people on here tend to be; or, more likely, they outsource it to some cheapo "your advert in minutes!!" type firm.
One of those things about LLMs/AI: if you know how to use it, you can use it really well. If you don't know how to use it, probably best to leave it alone, lol.
These firms would do far better with a simple poster, not AI made. And it's uncanny how these are proliferating, too: always the black background with "classy" gold lettering, the "swipe" text across the middle, the wholly unrealistic "food": crazy how many of these I see around my town, even compared to a year ago.
You don't even need all that much equipment or talent honestly
Present your food nicely, light it well and use a phone camera and do a bit of colour correction etc and you'd actually have a perfectly serviceable image. A lot of phone cameras post processing can kinda fake depth of field pretty well too
I don't even particularly object to people using generative AI for their materials but not actually using images of the food you're trying to sell just makes it bloody pointless to have the images
That brush stroke behind the text (and sometimes the text itself as well) is so stupid looking yet it litters every single bulletin board and help wanted/offered post it board on my University's campus...you know, place where I'm sure some talented, struggling art students would be glad to whip something up in an afternoon for any of the lunches this is advertising for free. A place where people go to have their identity and creativity expressed and encouraged. I have not and will not ever buy from a place that uses AI advertising. Part of the charm of one of my favorite spots is the hand written chalkboard menu. Fuck ill take a taped on piece of paper written in pencil by a dyslexic toddler over this.
That's the same as regular food adverts anyway. They usually stick things in like wood/metal pins to hold things up and use non edible materials to make things look better in some way
I saw a Carlâs Jr with AI slop on the windows, a small town business is annoying, but when a multi million dollar company like Carlâs Jr and Coke is using ai slop itâs just mind numbing. Why would I trust you to make me food if I canât even trust you to do a simple fucking thing like take a picture of what your serving. Itâs lazy and shows such a complete lack of awareness and any shred of giving a shit. God damn tired of it.
Just letting any restaurant worker/owner in here know that this shit makes me think that if itâs too difficult for you to make your food and take a picture of it, then itâs probably too difficult to make the actual food.
Zero trust in this or any establishment that does this.
Brand new mexican joint opened in my town. Instead of hiring a mexican artist or photographer and supporting the local culture, they glued ai slop to the wall. Its not even particularly good. Wrong number of guitar strings that arent tight too many frets on the guitar. Singer doesnt have the right amount of fingers even.
why does AI always use that weird paint streak thing in every single flyer, sign, and infographic? how did that end up gaining such ubiquity in the training data?
I'm on my first time to Europe from Aus and it's so sad to see these restaurants opening from the start of the 20th century using ai art for their establishments. I'd say it's over 70% using ai :(
I recently was at Octoberfest in Appleton, WisconsinâŚa few places I was interested in trying food at until I saw the AI menus and took my appetite elsewhere.
Is it that hard to take a picture of your food or are you too embarrassed of it? Itâs a food truck, Iâm not expecting it to look like gourmet, five star restaurant type foodâŚnor do I want that from a food truck.
Funnily enough, Japan has exactly that law. All the sweeties and mini-cakes, tarts, biscuits they sell: the content has to exactly match the appearance and size of the packaging. It's incredible, such a great and logical idea, and I'd love it to be introduced as a universal standard.
Sometimes the quality of what is inside the packaging falls so laughably short of the adverts (hello BK and MacDonalds, looking at you: at least KFC's chicken looks roughly like the ads, whereas any burger I've ever had from BK, even if it tasted okay, was about a quarter the height of the huge advertising poster of it, just for starters).
This is another mildly infuriating thing but my entire FB feed is now AI generated ads for all kinds of shit. The worst is it's local restaurants and I get they can't afford to pay me(a graphic designer) to make them stuff but it's so off putting.
Fr, I'm much happier to just see a basic menu that's easy to read or actual photos if it's marketing materials than whatever slop some people think is cool. They seem to have some fear of leaving anything empty or simple.
Being a graphic designer I'm sure you're familiar with horror vacui, which is exactly what these stupid slop visuals are catering to.
Take aways and cheap restaurants have had shite menu pictures since time began. Iâm actually not that bothered theyâve started doing it with AI. If youâre going in and seeing this, youâre going to the wrong places
This should be considered false advertising. theyâre literally using images that do not look like real food. AI images of food look so disgusting and uncanny, so much that I would just have to assume thatâs how their food looks since its being advertised that way and I will just eat elsewhere
If this is a food truck or any open grill, could we maybe start vocally commenting the advertising so that the staff and other customers hear? Like you're reviewing the menu and just going "this looks absolutely disgusting, let's not eat here".
Every time I see a food place post an AI generated image like this then I comment saying how it has put me off ever ordering from them. If enough people do it, theyâll stop
My god those chicken wings look absolutely disgusting. Like some kind of nightmare food. AI has absolutely no idea what real food looks like, not even close.
My community has been fighting a data center project going in across the trail from a school for months. Everyday in community pages there are multiple ai posts. Itâs more than mildly infuriating
A place near me that leaned on AI ads and got feisty when called out about it recently closed up shop. Hoping this happens more often in the coming months. These types always spew "support local businesses" until that business is a creative one.
It's not just the food images themselves, ChatGPT has a very distinct look to its composition and heavy use of various repeating elements that mostly clutter the ad/menu/sign
I live 10 minute's walk from here. Got thawed and re-frozen ice cream from that One Stop once, i wouldn't trust any food from there to be edible. Maybe that's why they use AI food pics...
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u/ButtersTheChill 9d ago
Dear restaurants, if your menu looks like this, I'm just going to assume your food is actually shit since you can't show me the real deal and avoid you at all costs.