At a small restaurant in Tennessee, USA.
I don’t like that they asked an LLM to graphic design the entire menu, but why in the name of robot jesus did they look at the result and say “great. Love it. Print 100 copies.”
The food pictures made me physically ill. They’re really upsetting! I told the Waitress, who agreed that the pics were awful, and the manager/owner(?) who didn’t seem to care.
There are LLM inconsistencies all over, too, like icons changing from page to page.
I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but I swear, a swathe of the older population seems to have “diffusion blindness.” They can glance at images like this and think its acceptable for their business, like something about their perception just softens the uncanny valley.
Hence, Facebook, in its current state.
There are business owners who greenlight even this crapola thinking the generated content is good enough, or because they want to get into the AI bandwagon because it’s so goddamn cheap to them, so that they don’t have to pay a professional photographer, a layout artist and a printing press just for a set of menus. All they care about is the results, cut to the chase, and that’s instant gratification.
If you want to be cheap, just don’t show the food. That’s what the penny pinchers used to do before the advent of clip art; print out a bare list of meals on the cheapest colored paper they could find.
If they were feeling really fancy, they’d laminate it and be uncomfortably insistent about getting it back.
Sure, they can do either one of these, but where I live, business owners are very vain, have little appreciation of art, but want to be seen as “sophisticated”; they love LLM immediacy, it’s almost magic to them, because they don’t have to come visit a print shop, tell what they want, then come back and be presented three different layout samples to choose from before final production.
Maybe they just need to put on their glasses
I wonder if it’s a visual acuity thing or… I dunno… I cannot figure it out… but yeah there’s a separation, boomers (not all but so fuckin many) cannot see it for some reason…
I’m curious. Why do you assume the restaurant owner must be older? What is the cause of “diffusion blindness” and how does it relate to a person’s age? IOW considering that these AI images are relatively new, common and widespread in less than the last 10 years or so, they are of the same “newness” to most people, certainly to all adults.
So, above what age would a person be susceptible to “diffusion blindness”, and why that particular age? Could it be related to the number of years lived before the rise of so many AI images? It seems to me that the more years lived before the influx of AI images, the weirder they would seem, so that the older a person, the more likely they would be to find the images bizarre and unnatural. Or do I have it backwards, and if so, please explain.
Much of social media these days is starting from “old people bad”, and working backwards from there. Including accusations that it’s only old people on Facebook engaging in nonsense. Absolutely no self awareness there at all.
What is Facebook like these days?
It’s a necessary evil in my country, and most of the local businesses I deal with are on FB. Half the time the content is really engagement garbage.
When I gave up Reddit cold turkey for APIpocalypse, I started browsing Facebook as mindless scrolling content.
And yes, I know, it’s worse than Reddit for a lot of reasons.
There’s a ton of AI slop on it. Los of repost bots. Lots of low effort culture war nonsense.
Outside of good Facebook groups, it’s mostly straight garbage. But, I kinda appreciate being able to see what the normies are seeing.
From what I have seen, it’s bottom-barrel diffusion/LLM generated engagement farming. Thirst posts, political ragebait, AI Jesus, trippy nonsense; basically anything to farm likes, which users apparently like in aggregate.
It’s notably more obvious than most social media. It’s even more obvious than Instagram, with its flood of bot influencers linking to autogenerated OnlyFans pages/chats.
On top of this, it’s basically the only place Meta can push Muse, as there is little interest in it elsewhere.
Oof. Glad I got rid of it then. Once the algorithm got rid of every friends post on my feed, there wasn’t really any point anymore.
Except Facebook Marketplace, which has a stranglehold on local listings :(
Not that I have used it, but it’s very tempting.
I did use Facebook marketplace once for Mario Kart 64. Movers stole my N64 when I was a kid and that game is a motherfucker to find these days without paying $80+.
I imagine many of them have vision so deteriorated that they literally can’t see the difference. And I will remind you, these people are still allowed to drive.
This is especially absurd in the context of it already being a restaurant. “How are we going to get pictures for the menu, boss?”
Gee, I dunno. Maybe just make the meal in question and take a fucking picture of it? You are running a restaurant, so I have to charitably assume that somebody there is capable of cooking whatever it is, and plating it up, and sticking it on the cleanest table in the joint for a couple of seconds. For being printed at 72 DPI and the size of a postage stamp anyway, using your cell phone to take the picture will be just fine.
Stock fotos. Cost a bit, but look great.
Most restaurants don’t even have a picture of the food, especially when the menu is really simple like this.
I mean honestly I’ve ordered plenty of food from text only menus and relied on ingredient descriptions to help me decide. I’m only disappointed when they give me something that is very against the platonic ideal of whatever they described. (I’m sorry but deep fried scones are a step too far away from egg battered bread for me to call it French toast)
Vision can be fine at certain sight distance and not fine at others. That may make them perfectly fine to drive but to miss fine details. This happens frequently with near and far sighted people.
I can’t see granular details anymore without glasses but that doesn’t affect my driving at all (granular details being font at sizes like 4 point). I used to be able to read it without problems, but as I have aged it’s not something I can do anymore.
Eh, that’s more cynical than what I mean. I’m not trying to insult older folks, not their health nor intelligence.
I was talking more about psycological ‘perception,’ assuming their vision is sharp, or they have reading glasses on or whatever. My observaton is their brain tends to operate more on ‘autopilot,’ even among remarkably smart older folks, so perhaps they’re more inclined to miss ‘uncanny valley’ things like this until someone points it out and they really focus on the picture’s details.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here. Like skimming while reading, you know what eggs look like. Also, if they took a bad pic, you’d skim like that too. Most menu’s pics don’t look like what you’re going to get regardless.
Taking a good looking picture of food is not actually all that easy, professionals earn(ed) a lot of money doing it.
That said i 100% prefer a casual real picture over the promotional art in a menu. I want to see what i am getting, not some artists rendition.
It’s so easy, honestly. This is fresh mackerel with a baked potato, patty pan squash, sugar snap peas, beet tops and courgette.
Yeah this “good pictures are hard” thing I keep hearing is nonsense to me. What the heck are people on about?
I guess this doesn’t look like a professional shot or something, but it’s plenty informative and doesn’t look Eldritch.
Or just have a menu without photos like most normal restaurants?
Considering they explicitly commented that photo quality isn’t important, how good professional photos of food are isn’t relevant.
Maybe i am blind but i dont think they explicitly said that.
I just know that “traditionally” food industry does not make pictures themselves they hire a professional artist for doing so. That was just normal bussines. So they where never in the habbit of doing it themselves.
While i never agreed with advertisment more fancy than the actual product. That is/was a career where people put real effort and artistic skill into. Its huge shame that its getting stolen by ai with literally 0 results.
I wonder what pictures this menu had before ai.
Depends on the ‘food industry’.
Big chains, sure, they have photographers come in.
The little chinese restauraunt near me, clearly they just snapped pictures of their food with smartphones and slapped them on the board. Their printed menu was just text. I suspect if this is a small restaurant, they probably just had text on menu, and thought AI could give them ‘big restaurant’ menu impression, but instead got horror show of crap. They probably could have provided some pictures and directed it to make a menu layout but do not generate images, but use these pictures.
Ehhhh, a smartphone with a common “food” filter and a decent angle on the food does a fairly good job these days. The small sensor actually gives just the right amount of depth of field, whereas a big camera would have to stop down or focus stack anyway.
I agree with the sentiment though. Running a business is hard; they only have so much energy, so corners have to be cut, and they clearly tried to cut the media budget they’d need to stage every meal on the menu.