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Comment by diabllicseagull | Hacker News Reader

I get the consumers' ick when I see an AI-generated menu, logo, or sign as much as the next person. Beyond that, there is an argument to be made about the discrepancy between the pictorial depictions of a food item and what you are actually served in real life. I wish something akin to Japan's strict food packaging laws existed for restaurants.

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I have a few friends I’d describe as high up in the restaurant industry. They’ll usually be skeptical of a menu with photos unless it’s a mom and pop place that’s been around for decades.

There’s a big reason more expensive restaurants don’t have pictures on their menus, even when they’re the best equipped to ensure your meal matches the picture.

Gordon Ramsay in many of his kitchen nightmare episodes says it's always a bad sign whenever a restaurant has photos on their menu.

Genuinely asking, why is it considered bad? If it is done right, it will guide the customer better on whether they want something like it. We all see the photos/reviews on google maps before going inside a restaurant.

Pictures on a menu implies that the menu rarely changes - menu creation is expensive and slow - and has standard offerings. This then means that food is likely to be less fresh, less seasonal, and more likely to be precooked in large batches and frozen/reheated. In short, it is a red flag for systemic cooking rather than artisinal cooking.

You find that most higher-class restaurants have a one-page menu, with a soup of the day, 4-7 dishes, and maybe a dessert, with the menu being written once a day and clear about what you get.

For food in addition to the false advertising it's just going to be the uncanny valley: there's thousands of years of evolutionary motivation to try and assess if food is safe. Any amount of "wrongness" will put people right off.

There's some hot take incoming about highly processed foods, but the reality is that's still designed and made by humans, for humans, and so passes all those initial hurdles like "is this poison or a trap?"

An image model doesn't even have that grounding.

They could have taken pictures of each of the food items and used that as the basis of the images, they would have gotten a much more accurate and less generic result. But then you wouldn't be seeing it on HN.

It's really easy to fix this behavior, as a consumer start throwing fits and refusing food when it comes out not as the picture. Enough people do it and those menus will change.

I wish something akin to Japan's strict food packaging laws existed for restaurants.

It’s just plain old false advertising, isn’t it? We already have laws about that.

My first thought was that the simplified illustrations of the dishes actually make for quickly finding something, or familiarizing yourself with new foods.

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