Santa Cruz restaurant changes logo after flurry of negative reviews for AI art
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
We had to make a rule against AI witch hunts. It brings out the worst in humans.
Sure, the most well regarded science fiction and fantasy artists get covers painted just for their books, but otherwise it's usually something off the shelf. I've seen unrelated book covers with the same image.
It's no different outside of publishing, with the same smiling families showing up in advertisements for all sorts of businesses.
Those same people are probably mad "desktop publishing" took the livelihoods of people who drew things by hand, used multi-media plus used exactoes and paste to bring designs to life.
What makes those reviews “jealous”? Jealous of what?
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.
All creative mechanical processes - whether it’s factory made furniture, reproduced prints of the Old Masters, or now gen AI outputs - rely on some examination of prior human output, because the judgment of what people will want to use or consume has already been made historically, and the mechanical processes are different ways of distilling those decisions into something that machines can reproduce.
In this particular case, the restaurant owner put effort into writing a prompt and presumably reviewing many possible outputs to pick one. What has happened with gen AI is that anyone who can somewhat visualize the artistic product they are looking for - a blurb in a specific style, a picture that has certain visual aspects, sounds that match some set of sonic characteristics they like - can now produce something passable without involving another human being. That has happened many times since the start of the Industrial Age - a vacuum cleaner does a passable job of cleaning surfaces, microwaves do a passable job of cooking foods, synthesizers do a passable job of sounding like a human orchestra, and so on. All these tasks could only be done, at any level of quality, by humans - now, humans are still capable of being more innovative and detail oriented than machines can with a variety of cognitive tasks, but machines have gotten to the “vacuum cleaner” level of producing equivalent outputs.
I get the anxieties and fears coming from seeing a whole class of aesthetic and cognitive tasks being taken over by machines, because the ability to compose a marketing slogan feels closer to the notion of human identity and cultural know-how, than knowing how to clean a home well. Is that what explains the incredible degree of paranoia and resentment we are seeing, evidenced in this case by people wanting to hurt someone’s business/livelihood because of how mad they are?
edit: forgot what I intended as a "reference link": [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=llm+ai+transformative+use+c...
And an owner who believes that means the locals want to “destroy” her business.
Im not choosing a side, but it doesn’t seem like they have a strong future with or without a logo. That’s just Santa Cruz culture, very aggro surfers.
Many of the surrounding restaurants are very immersed in local surf culture and put a great deal of resources and effort into their decor.
This sums it up well. If this were in New York, I’d be on the owner’s side (provided the food lives up). In Santa Cruz, it’s just tone deaf to (a) not involve the community in the design process, (b) not take the hint from the reviews and then (c) play the victim in the media.
It's their town. Also, I can't help but wonder why the owner didn't fight fire with playful fire–her place is literally called the salty otter. Be lovably salty!
I'd create an ad campaign for all my competitors-flyers, doorhangers etc. with the same info their usual ads have, but with slop-AI art all over them.
There isn't anything wrong w/ Santa Cruz that couldn't be solved by motivated YIMBYs parking a city of 800,000 people on top of it.
And if you made it through all 99 beers on their list, you got a small plaque on the wall, about the size of one of those e-ink grocery price tags. It was a great tavern-like atmosphere, and the kind of place that felt increasingly rare even before it was gone.
Time and time again, I see businesses fighting against rent-seeking landlords who are happy to remove a well-loved successful business for an extra few hundred a month. It's happening right now to Yard Bar (my favorite weird spot in Austin right now).
I know it's a thin margin business, but I wish every successful spot would take every damn dollar they made and at least by a comparable property so they have leverage against these landlords. It's a pointless destruction of value that doesn't have to happen to profitable well loved businesses.
An AI logo is consistent with that, though. I _do_ think that, in general, using generative AI for this sort of thing is basically declaring "I didn't care enough to do this properly", and that is a bad look for branding at the best of times.
It is an odd place.
I'm not sure what it's called, but there has to be a name for this logical error.
The reviewer is essentially saying: “If they cut corners on X, they must cut corners on Y”, which is a common logical error in making judgments based on incomplete information.
In this case, I would definitely agree that people that act sloppily in one aspect of business will almost always do the same in other aspects. More generally, I'd say that most classical logical fallacies are actually useful rules of thumb.
Some iconic ones stick out to me as pretty bad, especially when they are so often used to exploit or mislead.
* Appeal to authority, ad hominem: the conclusion might be true, you often have to judge a person's moral character and experience too.
* Appeal to tradition, wealth, poverty: sometimes the speaker has life experiences that justify the conclusion, but can't be explained in a brief conversation.
* Ad baculum: sometimes it's wise to stop engaging with the counterpart.
* Ad populum, to emotion: sometimes the argument is not really about the truth of a proposition(the existence of a problem, and gravity thereof), but about how politically feasible it is to do something about it.
* Correlation, not causation: correlation is evidence of causation in favour of the current best explanation. What that might be, is a matter for discussion. In day-to-day life we almost always lack the time for achieving 100% certainty.
More generally, very often people don't have time discuss a matter with treatise-level precision and diligence. We almost always have to rely on a judgement of the speaker or other circumstances, see also standards of proof in legal systems. Sometimes the true core of an argument is not really expressed overtly, whether consciously or not, and you have to figure out what the discussion is really about (very useful advice in a marriage or any close relationship).
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.
It's like arguing you wouldn't trust a lawyer with a medical negligence case if they can't suture a wound.
Or you wouldn't trust a graphic designer with a restaurant logo if they can't make good scrambled eggs.
Are you looking for "category confusion"? It's a conflation, but let's look at the logic. (So yes, my prior is that there is logic.)
"If they generated their logo by mumbling things at a toaster / picking something from the vending machine and then 'owning' it, how likely is it that they stole a sandwich in a grubby wrapper from a bum and are going to hand it to me and say 'I made this'?"
Edit: the article is paywalled, but a number of comments remark on the owner's sense of entitlement. So my moot is probably close for throwing blind. So then that might be the real issue, and the logo is a proxy for a perception of lack of work + mental bullying.
That simply isn't true though. It's not even possible to be true. Will a neurosurgeon put as much time in their cooking/cleaning/etc as they do their surgeries? There's not enough time/energy.
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I don't think that's a logical error at all. That is the explicit and overtly stated plan and promise of AI.
"Uses generative AI images" is a decent heuristic for "probably crap, best avoided", IME.
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
Not having to deal with the currently still trendy coffee culture and getting exactly the same coffee every time sounds perfect. Or let's say, it's perfect if the product tastes good.
Coffee is not that much different from Starbucks or any other big chain or even many indie places.
What is it that makes this different?
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.
Absolutely false. You don’t even have to try hard to find scores of examples of great artists who died penniless. Artists who lived in squalor for decades until they broke through, and even then made only a modest living.
0.001% of which get “paid plenty” and that’s more due to business acumen.
Creative fields are cutthroat, brutal and soul crushing.
LLMs have proven that most people don’t care or can’t tell the difference between human expression and a probabilistic approximation of it.
On the other hand, this article is about a sports bar logo. Only in Santa Cruz would you see people lose their shit over something so trivial. Are we supposed to be moved to tears by the human expression of a cartoon otter on a tacky surfboard?
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.
Obviously what I want isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, but its why I don't support using AI for anything creative over and above the ethics of companies capturing all of the value of everyone's past artwork, which also is soulless and aesthetically disgusting, much more so than an artist spending 1000s of hours learning from studying other art and synthesizing a similar style.