I've noticed a very sudden uptick in these AI designed signs and menus in my area. I fully understand why they are used by small business owners (fast and cheap), and I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction.
That said, my own aesthetic sense is very much turned off by them. It is hard for me to articulate why, but I can name four reasons:
- The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious;
- The information is presented in a haphazard way, with text randomly thrown all over the place;
- There is really only one kind of "style" of these signs that I've seen, and it's sad to think that this style (or lack thereof) may become ubiquitous;
- In a world where AI feels increasingly shoved down our throats, it is unnerving to so suddenly see its rise manifested in the physical world.
There are multiple widely replicated common crappy menu styles already. If anything AI generated menus are likely to lift the quality floor.
I recall in particular when I first moved to London and realised you could identify low quality Italian restaurants by whether they had the same laminated plastic dessert menu from some distributor of ready made desserts... The step up was when they'd cut and pasted parts of that menu design into their own template...
And keep in mind we notice the bad examples, because they stand out. They'll fade out of public consciousness as people get better at getting better output out of them, but they're not likely to disappear - menus have clearly been a low priority for a certain subset of places pretty much forever.
I think there is a big difference between using AI generated food pictures, vs. taking real pictures of your food and using AI to create a menu/poster.
The former is both weird, creepy most of the time, and false advertising. The latter is as you say - the state of the current status quo. I can tell that it's AI, but honestly it's just replacing low-effort human crud for low-effort AI crud. Doesn't bother me at all, it's actually a great use for the technology imo.
What about the pictures of Chinese food above the counter vs. the actual food you get? There has ALWAYS been a big difference between advertisements and menus and what the food really looks like.
Funnily enough, I was thinking of exactly those photos when writing my comment. I never found them to be all that misrepresentative - that they took a photo from their family friend of their father taken 20 years ago for the same dish they are making me and have it on some faded menu board behind the counter is... honestly pretty close.
It's the fake AI generated "shine" I guess that is the difference to me. Obviously totally made up, not real food, and made to look pretty.
It's mostly the uncanny valley. Both are indeed false advertising, but the AI generated ones are so obviously made up and not real it's a little off putting to me.
Wouldn't really stop me from ordering if I were already there, but it might make me order from their competitor if I were on Uber Eats or whatnot.
I imagine that some?/many? customers of a locally-owned coffee shop are choosing it precisely because it's not a soulless megacorp. They're choosing a different vibe on purpose. Ugly AI advertising is the opposite of that vibe.
The food is in the uncanny valley because no human was involved in assembling the output.
We've got millions of years of evolutionary wiring in our heads to try and figure out if something can be eaten - take that out of the process and you can screw up in a bunch of ways which raise alarm bells.
> How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?
If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture. That said, this is really only a problem for the store in respect of returns. If nobody is returning the product because it didn't look as advertised, there probably isn't any harm being done.
I'd expect the picture to be an idealized, perfected version of the food. That's how marketing works. But somewhere in there should be the actual food even if it's cold, sprayed with glycerin, and under studio lighting.
An AI image isn't anything to do with the actual dish. That's too far removed from the reality to be considered fair.
The point is that it was the same business making the image and the actual food. Now basically every business will have the same abomination of a cheeseburger on their menu because they all prompted the same thing, and as a result customers lose that signal.
So defensively we have to assume the worst, but when we actually do that (or god forbid talk to other people about it) online weirdos like yourself start jumping in front of the bullet.
It was hardly ever the same business making the image and the food.
I'll say that again - when a restaurant has pictures of food, those pictures are often from stock, not actual representative shots of the food the restaurant sells.
This especially applies to fast food and tourist eateries. (Upmarket restaurants don't usually have photos at all.)
Just Eat in the UK has a policy of requiring actual dish shots, but that's not the norm.
Hmm. This is not a common occurrence for me (in the US), has happened maybe once in my life that I can remember. I would have exactly the same issue with that, maybe worse since with AI slop I can at least tell before I've spent the money.
I once ordered from a Waffle House once exactly like this:
"I'll have the Texas Bacon Cheesesteak Omelette, with hashbrowns all the way...and I want it to look like the picture."
And to my disbelief, they don't throw a chair at my head.
Instead, the cook came over and asked about that -- usually, they'd finish cooking the omelette filling with the eggs because it tasted better that way, and he wanted to make sure that I wanted the fillings wrapped up as in the photo (kind of like a burrito) instead.
I saw him holding the menu with one hand to use as a reference when plating it. He presented it with a big smile. And, indeed, it did look exactly like the photo in the menu.
Yes? My main experience with menus with pictures is Chinese restaurants where they took a poorly staged and lit photo of the actual dish. Sometimes the real thing ends up looking better than the picture.
Er, all the time? In the South East of England, I specifically look for menus with pictures of the food on Just Eats because I can get an idea of how good the food is going to be that way. I don't think I've ever received something that didn't look like what was on the menu pictures. Sometimes people make a nice presentation with fancy dishware and so on (Indian restaurants do that a lot in particular), but the food is always the same as what I get when I order, except it's in a foam box or similar.
This isn't black and white, it's a sliding scale. Advertising, menu boards, box art, etc. do show the product in the best light possible and take artistic liberties, but are substantially closer to the real product than an AI that's never seen the product spitting out an image of a burger.
It's reasonable to be annoyed when the menu board _isn't based on the product at all_ and thus is nowhere close to the real thing.
If I got served food at a restaurant and realized that the pictures were from a different restaurant, I would be pissed off in exactly the same way and amount as if a menu used AI slop. The only difference is that with AI slop you can tell ahead of time and decide not to spend money there.
I don't eat cereal and I can't think of the last time I ate at a restaurant that had pictures on the menu, but to your point I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist.
> I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist
Neither the images created by ChatGPT nor an artists rendition of a latte exist, but based on this logic you’d have a problem with both?
I think most people are just reacting to the careless default style of ChatGPT, or the fact that a human didn’t draw it, not the fact that it’s not “real”.
I agree that it wasn’t a strong response, but 1) we can still be nice and 2) if you read the rest of their comment they do have substantive things to say.
I think it’s relevant in that they lack the personal experience, and so can’t comment on the given points from experience, as they might be expected to.
It's not that it's fake. It's that it has a distinct style.
I once thought that AI image/video would quickly become unidentifiable, but the surprising thing (so far) is that every new model release is followed by two reactions: "This is incredible" to "I recognize this style. It's AI. They're all the same."
It takes only a few weeks. I've been amazed with our mind's ability to move the goalpost.
In the U.S., at least, this is not really true. The FTC has laws that prohibits companies from using non-food products (e.g., glue for milk or motor oil for syrup) in photographs of food they’re selling. They also have laws about deceptive marketing practices. These laws definitely aren’t perfectly enforced, but it’s hardly the widespread problem you’re suggesting it is. Also pretty funny to specifically highlight Chinese food, which has always looked like someone used a disposable camera to hastily snap a photo of a real plate of food about to be given to a customer sometime in 1997 in ~90% of the Chinese restaurants I’ve ever been to.
AI obviously has 0 realness to it. So it’s worse in every way.
In this cases isn’t it that they can use the glue for milk though because they aren’t selling the milk, it’s the cereal (enlarged for texture) that they are selling.
Indeed you are correct about this! What I think is different in these cases is that the images of the food in your examples (generally) aim to make it look good, whereas the AI art makes it looks like slop (literally and figuratively).
I also prefer the side case of actual photos of the food, which is common at delis and some more authentic Chinese restaurants; these are also being replaced quickly by AI.
Has AI art made my food less delicious - I don't think I've ever purchased food I've seen first represented by AI, but certainly the expectation of taste affects your perception of it...
99% of AI slop posters aren't an artistic depiction / deviation from the real product, they are a grotesque amalgamation of whatever generic images of food are in the training data. If they weren't, it would take more effort than just hiring a freelancer and defeat the purpose for these greedy business owners.
Ah, you've been downvoted by the holier than thou "nyeeeh!" crowd.
You are correct though, especially fast food places using air brushed and photoshopped food photos are the inedible food object has been carefully set up.
And no amount of petty votes will change the above.
I hate trying to teach my children how to use Windows these days. When I was young, it took some effort to get programs up and running, but once you cleared that hurdle, the computer worked the same, consistently, every single time you turned it on.
Now, most of the time they log in there's a new update to install; or a fresh and distracting dark pattern popup; or a service they need to re-enter credentials for; or, occasionally, a game I've previously installed for them either missing or no longer working properly. It's maddening and confusing even for experienced users.
Perhaps I do need to drop Windows. I'm not a huge fan of the obfuscaon and walled gardens on Macs, and Chromebooks and iPads are more geared towards consumption than creation.
My work keeps me on Windows (programs that have no good Linux equivalent, and a corporate environment that won't accept it for desktop users), but I'm seriously considering dual booting for my children's sake. It's a testament to how far Windows has fallen.
Dual booting is only really for Windows programs that don't run well enough in WINE or a VM, which historically was primarily games before Steam made that a lot less relevant.
Dual booting is pretty easy these days. The linux distribution installers help to resize partitions etc. The main inconvenience is accessing stuff off linux from windows. I used dropbox to do the sync in the past. Now I'm mainly on kubuntu and rarely use an old windows machine for some tasks.
You beat me, I've only been dual booting for about 12 years. It's easier than it used to be if you want to preserve your existing NTFS partition and resize it. Linux tools couldn't do that until some point in the last x years.
When I multibooted Linux, DOS, Windows, and MacOS (Hackintosh) a long time ago, I had a huge FAT32 partition for this purpose as all the OSes could read and write it.
These days, ExFAT should also work for bigger files.
I do mostly video work. I am using DaVinci Resolve, which does have a Linux version, but a camera codec I very frequently encounter works seamlessly under Windows, and not at all under Linux. I've so far been unable to find a way to get it working in Linux.
I had Desktop icons disappear after a Windows update; individual game icons stop working after a Steam update; and Minecraft network play breaking constantly when Windows is on one version and whatever other device is on a different version. It all feels completely unstable and I brace myself for trouble whenever they turn on the PC.
1) Reducing chronic absenteeism by more aggressive tracking and offering social and financial support for students who may have difficulties at home.
2) Adding more optional school days during breaks, including busing and school lunches on those days.
3) The third isn't explicitly stated. The article mentions free college for public H.S. graduates, but it's hard to see how that would improve reading and math scores much earlier in life. The article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)
>the article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)
It's actually more than phonics[1], but gets called that because people know what phonics is. Phonology, Sound-Symbol Association, Syllables, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics are the broad categories, and it's all called structured literacy. This is contrasted with "Balanced Literacy", which was pseudoscience and broadly popular in the 1990s in US teaching. It's highly effective and evidence based.
I agree in general and that should be the position but it's probably more nuanced than this in practice: who published it when it's a dev that writes a script that just spits junk into the wild or reinforces someone else's troll-speech?
In general, I think LLM content has been found to not be copyrightable, but it would still speech when it's published. It would be the speech of the company publishing it, not the dev that wrote the script. So, ai-junk-news.com is still publishing some kind of speech, even if it was an LLM that wrote it. At least, that would be my interpretataion.
I want to gently push back on this from my perch in NYC. Pre-Uber, taxis had their monopolistic issues but were:
- available at most times on major thoroughfares with a raise of the hand.
- reliable - I was never once jerked around or overcharged by an NYC yellow cab, which I can not say about private cab companies I've seen in other cities.
The worst problem was finding cabs in the outer boroughs, and that was improved greatly with the "green cab" program (they were restricted to beginning their fares in the outer boroughs).
There's been a lot of time and gradual change since then, but what I see now (Post-Uber):
- In most of the city, it is difficult or impossible to hail a cab without an app.
- The Uber/app drivers are worse, clearly much less experienced and don't know where they are going.
- Price gouging has been outsourced to the app itself, and happens very frequently.
- Even once cabs are called on the app they often cancel or fail to show in anywhere near the advertised time.
Personally, I greatly prefer the Pre-Uber situation.
I want to push back against your pushback as someone who’s lived in both NYC and the SF area. I agree with you that Uber barely made sense in Manhattan. I never once used it and taxis were plentiful.
I’ve since realized that in the US, NYC is an exception. When I first came to SF and Seattle for job interview related things, I used taxis, only to find out that the taxis were so terrible I never used them again:
- In the suburbs of Seattle, I was given a taxi chit from the place I was interviewing. I called in for a cab and had to wait over a half an hour for one to pick me up.
- In SF, the airport cab I was using had his GPS unmounted from his dash, and ended up handing me the machine and asking me to help him navigate from the back seat. Then when we got to the hotel, he lamented my choice to pay by credit card as it meant he would get the money much later than if he had cash. After I told him I didn’t have the circa $100 in cash he was charging, he sadly acquiesced, then proceeded to take a literal paper rubbing imprint of the card number before I could leave.
I like to say that the Bay Area made Uber make sense, both in terms of urban planning and in terms of how terrible taxis were.
And I think those may be related: if you can get around well in a place like NYC using public transit or walking, taxis have to be a lot more attractive in order to justify their existence. In SF or Seattle they had much less competition due to the suburban sprawl and worse public transit.
Trying to identify and remove bias in any direction is a worthy goal. That said, an evenhanded and factual approach to doing this may result in more negative sentiment towards people or organizations that deny facts; push fringe ideas without the benefit of widespread public support, or evidence, or academic consensus; or who have similarities with historical people or organizations who have come to be viewed negatively with the benefit of hindsight.
They are not great for listening to music in high fidelity. The are great for spoken word, and fine for music if you're not super concerned about quality; I liken it to listening to music from the speaker on a small portable FM radio.
I've found it to not work consistently. When I first started it showed the whole thing, but after playing for a while and some refreshes it only shows the path that this browser has seen. So if I switch apps for a while with it running in the bg, then come back, it skips straight from where we were when I last played to where we are now
That said, my own aesthetic sense is very much turned off by them. It is hard for me to articulate why, but I can name four reasons:
- The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious;
- The information is presented in a haphazard way, with text randomly thrown all over the place;
- There is really only one kind of "style" of these signs that I've seen, and it's sad to think that this style (or lack thereof) may become ubiquitous;
- In a world where AI feels increasingly shoved down our throats, it is unnerving to so suddenly see its rise manifested in the physical world.
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