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Comment by HanShotFirst | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed a very sudden uptick in these AI designed signs and menus in my area. I fully understand why they are used by small business owners (fast and cheap), and I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction.

That said, my own aesthetic sense is very much turned off by them. It is hard for me to articulate why, but I can name four reasons:

- The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious;

- The information is presented in a haphazard way, with text randomly thrown all over the place;

- There is really only one kind of "style" of these signs that I've seen, and it's sad to think that this style (or lack thereof) may become ubiquitous;

- In a world where AI feels increasingly shoved down our throats, it is unnerving to so suddenly see its rise manifested in the physical world.

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I imagine that some?/many? customers of a locally-owned coffee shop are choosing it precisely because it's not a soulless megacorp. They're choosing a different vibe on purpose. Ugly AI advertising is the opposite of that vibe.

It has this ick about it that makes me feel the owner lost mightily in a crypto pump and dump several times in life.

The food is in the uncanny valley because no human was involved in assembling the output.

We've got millions of years of evolutionary wiring in our heads to try and figure out if something can be eaten - take that out of the process and you can screw up in a bunch of ways which raise alarm bells.

Ancient cave dwellers wandering the steppes, carefully distinguishing potable lattes from poisonous varieties of herbal tea.

Did they know they were doing an expensive AI image detection training run.

Milk aside, lattes and tea aren't modern enough for this attempt at sarcasm to land.

There are multiple widely replicated common crappy menu styles already. If anything AI generated menus are likely to lift the quality floor.

I recall in particular when I first moved to London and realised you could identify low quality Italian restaurants by whether they had the same laminated plastic dessert menu from some distributor of ready made desserts... The step up was when they'd cut and pasted parts of that menu design into their own template...

And keep in mind we notice the bad examples, because they stand out. They'll fade out of public consciousness as people get better at getting better output out of them, but they're not likely to disappear - menus have clearly been a low priority for a certain subset of places pretty much forever.

If anything, it reliably signals "cheap".

I think there is a big difference between using AI generated food pictures, vs. taking real pictures of your food and using AI to create a menu/poster.

The former is both weird, creepy most of the time, and false advertising. The latter is as you say - the state of the current status quo. I can tell that it's AI, but honestly it's just replacing low-effort human crud for low-effort AI crud. Doesn't bother me at all, it's actually a great use for the technology imo.

What about the pictures of Chinese food above the counter vs. the actual food you get? There has ALWAYS been a big difference between advertisements and menus and what the food really looks like.

Funnily enough, I was thinking of exactly those photos when writing my comment. I never found them to be all that misrepresentative - that they took a photo from their family friend of their father taken 20 years ago for the same dish they are making me and have it on some faded menu board behind the counter is... honestly pretty close.

It's the fake AI generated "shine" I guess that is the difference to me. Obviously totally made up, not real food, and made to look pretty.

It's mostly the uncanny valley. Both are indeed false advertising, but the AI generated ones are so obviously made up and not real it's a little off putting to me.

Wouldn't really stop me from ordering if I were already there, but it might make me order from their competitor if I were on Uber Eats or whatnot.

My usual Chinese spots have pretty terrible food pictures, seemingly taken as an afterthought with no effort given to make the food look more appetizing at all. So kind of the opposite of false advertising.

And that is true.. but guess what? We should be inventing technologies that DIMINISH and punish this behaviour.

But we ain't. We are doing the exact opposite. Nice.

The best we have is Google reviews lmao.

As long as it's visibly AI, I don't think it's meaningfully false advertising. The bigger problem with respect to false advertising will be when even the low-effort AI crud is plausible enough that people don't recognise it.

There's a recent meme of AI-generated representations of food being notably unappetizing, even grotesque and repulsive:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ai-restaurant-food-images

"If anything, it reliably signals "cheap""

And this my friends is closer to what GI is than solving Navier-Stokes.

I know many... lets say 'intellecutals' here can't fathom it - but it's true.

> If anything AI generated menus are likely to lift the quality floor.

The consensus among my peers and clearly the people in this article is that badly-designed or templated menus are perceived to be of higher quality than AI-generated menus. This is clearly not universal as business owners obviously don't seem to mind, but business owners are not especially known for having good taste in design and those of us who do find these AI menus atrocious.

>>I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction.

Im in India, ordered a bed from a carpenter, a week later he made a great a bed. He took pictures, and used some AI magic had it put it in more grand rooms. He posted it on his Instagram and Facebook feeds.

The next day when I went to him to have it delivered to my place, he showed me he had received lots of offers to make the same bed for other people and his order book was full for the next few months.

Until the robots actually arrive to do his work, AI in many way is going to a huge positive for him. Its going to be the same case for many many such people.

> The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious;

Whereas with non-AI-generated food pics you know that the McPlastic burger you order will look exactly, totally, 100% like the one in the photo.

And your point is ...?

We were feasting on lies. Rather than demand honesty our instincts instead reach for a deathly sort of deliciousness. Anyways what was your point in the discussion?

We'd rather have the artisanal hand-crafted lies of the past than today's AI-generated lies.

I have some bad news for you:

• The pictures on cereal boxes aren't entirely real, either. They use school glue, not milk.

• Your burger has never looked like the one on the menu (see Falling Down)

• I've never eaten at a Chinese takeaway where the food looked like the light-up menu board, either.

How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?

In the U.S., at least, this is not really true. The FTC has laws that prohibits companies from using non-food products (e.g., glue for milk or motor oil for syrup) in photographs of food they’re selling. They also have laws about deceptive marketing practices. These laws definitely aren’t perfectly enforced, but it’s hardly the widespread problem you’re suggesting it is. Also pretty funny to specifically highlight Chinese food, which has always looked like someone used a disposable camera to hastily snap a photo of a real plate of food about to be given to a customer sometime in 1997 in ~90% of the Chinese restaurants I’ve ever been to.

AI obviously has 0 realness to it. So it’s worse in every way.

In this cases isn’t it that they can use the glue for milk though because they aren’t selling the milk, it’s the cereal (enlarged for texture) that they are selling.

Yes that is true. But, e.g., a restaurant that sells you a bowl of cereal would not be allowed to do this.

> How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?

If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture. That said, this is really only a problem for the store in respect of returns. If nobody is returning the product because it didn't look as advertised, there probably isn't any harm being done.

> If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture.

Has food ever looked like the picture, though? I find this position unrealistic outside of an Amazon return excuse.

> Has food ever looked like the picture, though? I find this position unrealistic outside of an Amazon return excuse.

Yeah man it's unrealistic for restaurants to take pictures of the food they make and use that for the menu. Totally.

I'd expect the picture to be an idealized, perfected version of the food. That's how marketing works. But somewhere in there should be the actual food even if it's cold, sprayed with glycerin, and under studio lighting.

An AI image isn't anything to do with the actual dish. That's too far removed from the reality to be considered fair.

Motor oil on a perfect pancake from a batch of 10 that they put 100x more effort into for the photo?

Sign me up, I love it.

AI image of a pancake because the small business owner doesn’t have a Kellog’s budget?

Fuck that guy, I hope his business fails

The point is that it was the same business making the image and the actual food. Now basically every business will have the same abomination of a cheeseburger on their menu because they all prompted the same thing, and as a result customers lose that signal.

So defensively we have to assume the worst, but when we actually do that (or god forbid talk to other people about it) online weirdos like yourself start jumping in front of the bullet.

It was hardly ever the same business making the image and the food.

I'll say that again - when a restaurant has pictures of food, those pictures are often from stock, not actual representative shots of the food the restaurant sells.

This especially applies to fast food and tourist eateries. (Upmarket restaurants don't usually have photos at all.)

Just Eat in the UK has a policy of requiring actual dish shots, but that's not the norm.

Just Eat in the UK has a policy of requiring actual dish shots, but that's not the norm.

Just Eat has recently started allowing AI images, but does tag them as AI.

Hmm. This is not a common occurrence for me (in the US), has happened maybe once in my life that I can remember. I would have exactly the same issue with that, maybe worse since with AI slop I can at least tell before I've spent the money.

Fuck that guy, I hope his business fails

Kellogs need a perfect picture to sell millions of pancakes.

Small business doesn't. They can use a slightly worse picture, or no picture.

This wasn't a problem 2 years ago when the best AI was Midjourney and terrible. It's not a problem today either.

Yes, it has happened at least one time.

I once ordered from a Waffle House once exactly like this:

"I'll have the Texas Bacon Cheesesteak Omelette, with hashbrowns all the way...and I want it to look like the picture."

And to my disbelief, they don't throw a chair at my head.

Instead, the cook came over and asked about that -- usually, they'd finish cooking the omelette filling with the eggs because it tasted better that way, and he wanted to make sure that I wanted the fillings wrapped up as in the photo (kind of like a burrito) instead.

I saw him holding the menu with one hand to use as a reference when plating it. He presented it with a big smile. And, indeed, it did look exactly like the photo in the menu.

Yes? My main experience with menus with pictures is Chinese restaurants where they took a poorly staged and lit photo of the actual dish. Sometimes the real thing ends up looking better than the picture.

>> Has food ever looked like the picture, though?

Er, all the time? In the South East of England, I specifically look for menus with pictures of the food on Just Eats because I can get an idea of how good the food is going to be that way. I don't think I've ever received something that didn't look like what was on the menu pictures. Sometimes people make a nice presentation with fancy dishware and so on (Indian restaurants do that a lot in particular), but the food is always the same as what I get when I order, except it's in a foam box or similar.

This isn't black and white, it's a sliding scale. Advertising, menu boards, box art, etc. do show the product in the best light possible and take artistic liberties, but are substantially closer to the real product than an AI that's never seen the product spitting out an image of a burger.

It's reasonable to be annoyed when the menu board _isn't based on the product at all_ and thus is nowhere close to the real thing.

If I got served food at a restaurant and realized that the pictures were from a different restaurant, I would be pissed off in exactly the same way and amount as if a menu used AI slop. The only difference is that with AI slop you can tell ahead of time and decide not to spend money there.

> has food ever looked like the picture, though?

Yeah. Especially at Asian restaurants. (With predominantly Asian customers.)

If a menu has like clearly painted or drawn images, on the other hand, I weigh them on artistic merit versus anything descriptive.

When most people have a bad experience at a restaurant they never go back, so the harm is hard to quantify until it stacks up.

I don't eat cereal and I can't think of the last time I ate at a restaurant that had pictures on the menu, but to your point I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist.

> I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist

Neither the images created by ChatGPT nor an artists rendition of a latte exist, but based on this logic you’d have a problem with both?

I think most people are just reacting to the careless default style of ChatGPT, or the fact that a human didn’t draw it, not the fact that it’s not “real”.

> I don’t eat cereal

Wow, you really got him with this completely relevant fact that did not at all miss the point.

I agree that it wasn’t a strong response, but 1) we can still be nice and 2) if you read the rest of their comment they do have substantive things to say.

I think it’s relevant in that they lack the personal experience, and so can’t comment on the given points from experience, as they might be expected to.

It's not that it's fake. It's that it has a distinct style.

I once thought that AI image/video would quickly become unidentifiable, but the surprising thing (so far) is that every new model release is followed by two reactions: "This is incredible" to "I recognize this style. It's AI. They're all the same."

It takes only a few weeks. I've been amazed with our mind's ability to move the goalpost.

AI art has made the experience meaningfully less enjoyable.

Indeed you are correct about this! What I think is different in these cases is that the images of the food in your examples (generally) aim to make it look good, whereas the AI art makes it looks like slop (literally and figuratively).

I also prefer the side case of actual photos of the food, which is common at delis and some more authentic Chinese restaurants; these are also being replaced quickly by AI.

Has AI art made my food less delicious - I don't think I've ever purchased food I've seen first represented by AI, but certainly the expectation of taste affects your perception of it...

Ah, you've been downvoted by the holier than thou "nyeeeh!" crowd.

You are correct though, especially fast food places using air brushed and photoshopped food photos are the inedible food object has been carefully set up.

And no amount of petty votes will change the above.

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