People are vocal about what they feel passionate about, and a world where they weren't or couldn't sounds hellish to me. How would society ever progress? We'd still have "whites only" restaurants in that world.
Not saying that justifies all anger targeted at business owners, but a blanket "criticism bad" stance is a bit silly. You have to make an actual argument as to why you think the anti-AI crowd is misguided in this case.
The headline makes it sound like people are phoning in bomb threats and violence, which doesn't seem to be happening at all.
Honestly, I think the business owner should have ignored these weak "threats" altogether. It doesn't have anything to do with coffee and it's unlikely they'll get any business because they use AI, so it can only hurt them.
If somebody threatens them with violence (which is what "threat" is usually implying) then that's a different thing entirely.
I am really disturbed by language minimizes concrete actions taken to cause harm.
"I am not hurting your business I am just talking to my friends!"
It's her right to use AI, but the customers also have the right to say they won't patronize businesses who use AI, and are free to tell people they know that the business is using it.
If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
> If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
To entertain this analogy, if a shop is misrepresenting their ingredients then it can make sense to spread the word, particularly if the shop owner refuses to rectify the issue, because there are health implications which represent a legitimate material harm to their customer base and the safety issue takes priority over the shop owner's bottom line.
An AI menu, assuming it offers a reasonable representation of what the shop offers, has no safety issue.
It doesn't matter anyway, because "using AI" doesn't make somebody a protected class. If people don't want to patronize businesses that use AI, there's nothing wrong with that.
No, if you have to make several indirect causal leaps, to get from "shop owner uses ChatGPT instead of MS Word to generate a menu" to "somewhere a graphic designer loses their employment" it is not legitimate. And if that is how you interpret the world, virtually any harmful or even violent action can be rationalized in the name of stopping some probabilistic harm.
Sticking with your cow's milk analogy, serving the wrong milk to the wrong customer with a dairy allergy can cause immediate harm to their health. Generating an AI menu cannot be reasonably interpreted as causing direct harm to anyone.
> If people don't want to patronize businesses that use AI, there's nothing wrong with that.
I completely agree. But making a personal choice to not visit a business and undertaking a coordinated effort to organize a boycott against a business is in a different category altogether.
The milk comparison is specious and irrelevant, because consumers are there for the product. Coffee shops sell coffee, not jpegs.
But aside from that - bullying and threatening a working mother with a newborn is not the moral high ground you seem to believe it is.
She's not a witch, and your assumed right to burn her is not a good look.
See how that works? That's why you should care. The so-called influencer-orienter culture has become a plague after social media. And these F&B businesses are the ones hit hardest - remember all those movies in the 90s and 00s about how some up and coming entrepreneur or chef had to win the approval of some hoity-toity food journalist?
Also, rest assured, I'm not serious about badmouthing you or anyone here for that matter - just trying to illustrate a point.
If it were me, I would have called their bluff and ignored them.
In the case of this shop, we're talking about local retail. If you are a retail small business owner you have to assume that any customer can be an "influencer" and cause significant harm if they seek to trash your business online.