Comment by matthewowen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewowen | Hacker News Reader

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I was talking to my daughter a few weeks ago about a coffee shop that was opening soon and I said that based on the posters in the window it probably wouldn’t be very good. She didn’t really understand how I could draw that conclusion and I explained that you could tell that they had been stretched to fit the available dimensions in a way that clearly distorted the images and text. And that like… if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things.

And I think it’s ultimately the same sort of thing? If in your marketing materials you don’t value craft and you take the shortest path rather than embrace your constraints and produce something good within them, then that’s maybe a negative signal about how you treat the thing you actually do.

IME the people I know who embody great craft in a field… they care about it in everything they do, and they don’t do a thing unless they can do it with care. I think sloppy AI is just a very strong signal of someone who doesn’t follow that.

This is so definitely not true in many many cases. The best pizza shops in NYC for decades have been quaint, basic and often messy spaces. The ones with the nice menus and overdone decor were often subpar and would fail. This also applies to the best chinese food. Opening a business is hard, you might be incredibly passionate about pizza or coffee but not have budget for a designer. When traveling I usually have way better food at the unpretentious local street food spots rather than the michelin star ones that are all about presentation.

Fake news. There's no such thing as good pizza in NYC :P

"Quaint and basic" does not equate to "careless". Also, I wouldn't describe any of the good pizza places I've been to in the city as "messy". If you have some place or some piece of advertising in mind, do please share it.

> if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things

I'm not convinced. This rule holds only if the two "things" are related. But one can have a passion for serving the best quality coffee, and be a total wreck in graphic arts.

If you're really passionate about serving the best quality coffee, you'll be passionate about the experience around that, and you'll put effort in even if it doesn't pay off.

AI-generated art signals that you didn't put effort in, and so aren't passionate about the experience, and so aren't really passionate about the central thing.

"At least you tried" is not a high standard, but it's the one that AI art fails.

While I agree with the general sentiment (people not putting effort is a bad signal), I also think people are sometimes being too harsh. Everybody has limited time and resources and knowledge. Making something (a business, a book, a website, etc.) means making some trade-offs with the resources you got.

When I can easily (without lots of effort/resources) check the quality of something, I prefer not to be that influenced by this type of "bad signals". Think of buying a coffee or trying a sandwich place. When I make a big investment, like a laptop or a TV, yes then it is a different story.

sure i guess, but some of the best food i've ever eaten was in some cheap chinese restaurant that didnt care at all about the "experience" or w/e ^^

I think there's a difference between passively and actively putting no thought into something; generating a menu with AI involves deciding that it's worth having but that you don't care about the quality.

Yea I don’t get the GP/OP sentiment at all.

Some of the best food I ate in places that looked like complete design wrecks. And yes now these places use a lot of really badly made ai art.

The food is still delicious.

I think you're making a lot of assumptions that don't really hold up in reality.

I disagree, but it's also academic. Even if every single one of my assumptions is unfair, they're still being made by me and others. Restaurants need to consider the reputational risk caused by customer perception. There's a whole film about it [1].

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382932/

>Even if every single one of my assumptions is unfair, they're still being made by me and others.

stomps feet in anger "Daddy, I want a squirrel! Get me one of those squirrels! I want a trained squirrel!"

Wrong film.

I've thought about the specific example of distorted menu photos before as well and to me it also signals intelligence level in the proprietor. I can't imagine myself in that position, looking at that and saying, "yup, that's good." And I also have a hard time imagining not understanding why it looks bad, what one could have done to not make it bad. It feels like a distinct decision to be lazy.

And like you said, if they are that careless and unadept at one thing, how are they going to work the intricacies of an espresso machine and food safety standards? Not that an espresso machine is that hard to operate, but surely it's more difficult than maintaining the aspect ratio of a photo. You don't even need to know the term "aspect ratio" to get it right.

But I also have to admit that my expectations seem to be very off on this specific issue. My wife is quite intelligent (actual, literal genius) and even quite artsy, and yet I had to teach her how to not resize photos incorrectly, both for aspect ratio and quality by resizing too large. It's seems like such an easy thing to see and figure out to me. This must be how my 10 year old sees my chess play.

It's very hard to operate an espresso machine.

If you want to pull good shots you need to be adjusting grind (etc) every day and throughout the day. So it's a case where you have to check and adjust output continuously.

So for me that's especially a case where like, do you pay attention to detail and take time to fix obvious mistakes is probably the number one requirement.

>If you're really passionate about serving the best quality coffee, you'll be passionate about the experience around that

The degree to which the menu is part of "the experience around that" is exactly the debate here; you can't just claim it as axiomatic.

>AI-generated art signals that you didn't put effort in,

or it signals you spend your time sourcing the best beans, understanding the climate of the various bean producing regions, reading trade news for the coffee industry, ...

>"At least you tried" is not a high standard, but it's the one that AI art fails.

Again, says you

I don't know. This reply is AI generated and I really care

I think generally the opposite is true. A place with bad coffee but great decor can charge the same as a place with good coffee but crappy everything else. And so to maximize profitability, it does just that, meaning that at any price level, the place with the worst non-coffee has the best coffee. If you judge them by their posters, then what you’re paying for is the posters.

I think people complaining about AI art at businesses are making an aesthetic argument and then laundering it into ones with more heft. I mostly agree with the aesthetic argument, but it’s only that, not some wider indictment.

You could literally have a blank piece of paper with the word "coffee" printed on it in times new roman and it would look better than off ratio AI slop graphics. It's not a case where better necessarily costs more.

I also think that you are assuming here that the effort not spent on good signs is being spent on good coffee. That might not be true. It might be spent on nice chairs, or it might be being spent on pastries, or on non-coffee drinks, or one of the many other things a coffee shop can focus on. In fact even if coffee, maybe they do brewed coffee and espresso based drinks and cold brew and milk oriented drinks and milk-substitute oriented drinks. Which of these are they spending effort on?

The thing about coffee shops is actually that they tend to do a lot of things, and so unless they do almost of them well there's a good chance they don't do one of the things you care about in a coffee shop well. Consequently it makes sense to say "given that you don't do this thing well, there's a good chance there are other things you don't do well and those things might be important for me in a coffee shop".

Generally for restaurants, the better the menu looks, the better the decor, the worse the food is. The 'hole in the wall' places are always the hidden gems. The slick-looking places are always a disappointment.

I read this quote somewhere: How you do something is how you do everything. I go by this principle in my life. Lately, I have been thinking in how many cases will this be not true.

>if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things

ah the inverse of the "i'm good at coding, therefore i am good at everything."

I want my restaurants to have delicious food; I don't expect them to have (or hire) graphic designers. Every dollar spent on design is a dollar that is not going to the quality of my food.

The hate on AI menus is irrational, unless eating at a specific place is meant for its societal signaling value rather than for its food.

No, it's entirely rational to judge a service based on external signals.

If you need medical treatment, will you go to a doctor operating out of an office, or a doctor operating out of their own garage? Theoretically, either one could be good or bad at medicine, but in practice, professionalism is a useful signal.

An ugly AI-generated menu shows a naive disregard for the actual experience of your customers. This attitude will bleed into the food quality.

> Every dollar spent on design is a dollar that is not going to the quality of my food.

Then throw something together in MS Word. That's free. It's not bad for something to be low-effort; it just needs to be commensurately simple.

And the MS Word menu at least conveys human effort. I absolutely don't care if the menu is in one font and looks like an amateur did the layout. I don't expect restaurant owners to be accomplished graphic designers, I do like to see them appear to care and be personally invested in every aspect of their restaurant.

I hear more and more stories about people running into obviously AI-generated stuff whether it's menus, posters, news articles, music, or videos and they find it a turn-off. So if a small business is wanting to use AI, it's probably best to limit it to internal workflows, and not have it be too apparent in your public facing appearance.

>If you need medical treatment, will you go to a doctor operating out of an office, or a doctor operating out of their own garage? Theoretically, either one could be good or bad at medicine, but in practice, professionalism is a useful signal.

Is it a garage that has the same hygiene standards and medical equipment as an office? Your metaphor kinda falls apart here, because those are not orthogonal to the medical service outcomes, the way that a menu is orthogonal to the food quality.

>No, it's entirely rational to judge a service based on external signals.

This is the crux of why we disagree: you think of a restaurant as a seller of a service and you count things like "menu" as part of that service. Thats fine if you want status signaling from your restaurant. I see a restaurant as a purveyor of a good: the food that is produced, and the menu is orthogonal to that. You and I are optimizing for different things.

"Experience" versus food.

> Is it a garage that has the same hygiene standards and medical equipment as an office?

Maybe! A garage can be cleaned very thoroughly, especially if you renovate with that in mind. I wouldn't bet on it, though. A good doctor probably could operate out of a garage, but they wouldn't. And a good restaurateur would take time to think about their menu.

These signals select for people with domain knowledge and experience. Status has nothing to do with it. Even the cheapest street food will be evaluated against its competition based on external signals, and so better, more experienced vendors will tend to know how to present themselves well.

All else being equal, would you rather eat a hot dog from a cart with a nice sign, or from a guy sitting on the sidewalk who sharpied "Hotdog $3" on a piece of cardboard?

>All else being equal, would you rather eat a hot dog from a cart with a nice sign, or from a guy sitting on the sidewalk who sharpied "Hotdog $3" on a piece of cardboard?

You keep introducing these silly confounding variables. I wouldn't eat from any hotdog vendor who is sitting on the sidewalk, regardless of their signage. If both had carts, the signage wouldn't affect my decision, particularly because hotdogs are shit in my opinion. As nice sign on a hotdog cart is like putting lipstick on a pig.

I'm introducing examples. It's logical to judge a thing based on its context and circumstances, because those can tell you about the thing. A menu can tell you about a restaurant in the same way that the presence or absence of a cart can tell you about a street-food vendor.

> hotdogs are shit in my opinion

Then by all means, substitute the street food of your preference. Unless you disdain street food in general, which would be irrational, unless eating at a specific place is meant for its societal signaling value rather than for its food :)

Coffee shops do a lot of things. Do they make good espresso? Do they do good brewed coffee? Is their cold brew good? Do they have good pastries? Do they do good milk based drinks? Do they offer milk substitutes? Do the staff make you feel inconvenient or are they pleasant? Are they nice places to sit? Is the WiFi good? Are there power outlets?

You probably don't care about all of those things. Other people probably care about a totally disjoint other set of them. If you ask the proprietor of a coffee shop they might care about some of these things and not the others. But you can't tell in advance.

Once you see one thing done poorly, it's not unreasonable to think other things that are important to you might also seem peripheral to the proprietor but actually be important to you.

> IME the people I know who embody great craft in a field… they care about it in everything they do, and they don’t do a thing unless they can do it with care.

Fully agreed. It's one reason I've taken to doing more things myself at home. I don't even go to coffee shops anymore, I just make coffee at home. For the price of a month's coffee at a local shop, I bought the equipment and learned by practice and watching a lot of James Hoffman (and others) on YouTube. One thing my father taught me that's really stuck with me is: "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right." That's not just about caring about what you do to get it right, it's also about caring if you're spending your time doing the right things. I do a whole lot less these days than I used to, because I realized a lot of the stuff I used to do was performative or just a waste of time with no upside. The things I do now though, I put my heart and soul into, because I get in return more value/enjoyment from having done it correctly and at its absolute best or at least at my absolute best.

Seeing sloppy work or AI output in the flesh is a hard negative signal for me that I won't engage with a business. Online I see AI output as a signal that whatever business I may be engaging with is probably a scam/scammer. I see interesting things advertised on my feed but hardly ever buy because most of the time their website is clearly AI generated and I have no feeling of assurance that the product is even real or valuable. Something that has had no human thought or reason applied to it is not going to solve any legitimate problem, and therefore I am not going to spend money on it no matter how good it looked in the fraction of a second I saw it in an ad. Seeing that AI output is almost like a stop-break, that lets me think through whether or not its worth having at all.

There is a good chance you will be wrong, but it's not like you will actually check whether or not you were wrong. You are assuming that you are correct, and have already come to the conclusion that the coffee shop is not good. But even if it is good, you will not admit that it is good, because then you will have to admit that you were wrong.

Hopefully, your daughter just politely nodded her head, and did not actually listen to you.

Ironically, you just made even more inferences than I did!

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