At a small restaurant in Tennessee, USA.
I don’t like that they asked an LLM to graphic design the entire menu, but why in the name of robot jesus did they look at the result and say “great. Love it. Print 100 copies.”
The food pictures made me physically ill. They’re really upsetting! I told the Waitress, who agreed that the pics were awful, and the manager/owner(?) who didn’t seem to care.
There are LLM inconsistencies all over, too, like icons changing from page to page.
I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but I swear, a swathe of the older population seems to have “diffusion blindness.” They can glance at images like this and think its acceptable for their business, like something about their perception just softens the uncanny valley.
Hence, Facebook, in its current state.
I imagine many of them have vision so deteriorated that they literally can’t see the difference. And I will remind you, these people are still allowed to drive.
This is especially absurd in the context of it already being a restaurant. “How are we going to get pictures for the menu, boss?”
Gee, I dunno. Maybe just make the meal in question and take a fucking picture of it? You are running a restaurant, so I have to charitably assume that somebody there is capable of cooking whatever it is, and plating it up, and sticking it on the cleanest table in the joint for a couple of seconds. For being printed at 72 DPI and the size of a postage stamp anyway, using your cell phone to take the picture will be just fine.
Taking a good looking picture of food is not actually all that easy, professionals earn(ed) a lot of money doing it.
That said i 100% prefer a casual real picture over the promotional art in a menu. I want to see what i am getting and i mean prefer it over the professional photo. Ai food looks absolutely disgusting.
Ehhhh, a smartphone with a common “food” filter and a decent angle on the food does a fairly good job these days. The small sensor actually gives just the right amount of depth of field, whereas a big camera would have to stop down or focus stack anyway.
I agree with the sentiment though. Running a business is hard; they only have so much energy, so corners have to be cut, and they clearly tried to cut the media budget they’d need to stage every meal on the menu.
It’s so easy, honestly. This is fresh mackerel with a baked potato, patty pan squash, sugar snap peas, beet tops and courgette.
Yeah this “good pictures are hard” thing I keep hearing is nonsense to me. What the heck are people on about?
I guess this doesn’t look like a professional shot or something, but it’s plenty informative and doesn’t look Eldritch.
Considering they explicitly commented that photo quality isn’t important, how good professional photos of food are isn’t relevant.
Maybe i am blind but i dont think they explicitly said that.
I just know that “traditionally” food industry does not make pictures themselves they hire a professional artist for doing so. That was just normal bussines. So they where never in the habbit of doing it themselves.
While i never agreed with advertisment more fancy than the actual product. That is/was a career where people put real effort and artistic skill into. Its huge shame that its getting stolen by ai with literally 0 results.
I wonder what pictures this menu had before ai.
Or just have a menu without photos like most normal restaurants?
I imagine many of them have vision so deteriorated that they literally can’t see the difference. And I will remind you, these people are still allowed to drive.
Eh, that’s more cynical than what I mean. I’m not trying to insult older folks, not their health nor intelligence.
I was talking more about psycological ‘perception,’ assuming their vision is sharp, or they have reading glasses on or whatever. My observaton is their brain tends to operate more on ‘autopilot,’ even among remarkably smart older folks, so perhaps they’re more inclined to miss ‘uncanny valley’ things like this until someone points it out and they really focus on the picture’s details.
so perhaps they’re more inclined to miss ‘uncanny valley’ things like this until someone points it out and they really focus on the picture’s details.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here. Like skimming while reading, you know what eggs look like. Also, if they took a bad pic, you’d skim like that too. Most menu’s pics don’t look like what you’re going to get regardless.
Vision can be fine at certain sight distance and not fine at others. That may make them perfectly fine to drive but to miss fine details. This happens frequently with near and far sighted people.
I can’t see granular details anymore without glasses but that doesn’t affect my driving at all (granular details being font at sizes like 4 point). I used to be able to read it without problems, but as I have aged it’s not something I can do anymore.
I wonder if it’s a visual acuity thing or… I dunno… I cannot figure it out… but yeah there’s a separation, boomers (not all but so fuckin many) cannot see it for some reason…
There are business owners who greenlight even this crapola thinking the generated content is good enough, or because they want to get into the AI bandwagon because it’s so goddamn cheap to them, so that they don’t have to pay a professional photographer, a layout artist and a printing press just for a set of menus. All they care about is the results, cut to the chase, and that’s instant gratification.
If you want to be cheap, just don’t show the food. That’s what the penny pinchers used to do before the advent of clip art; print out a bare list of meals on the cheapest colored paper they could find.
If they were feeling really fancy, they’d laminate it and be uncomfortably insistent about getting it back.
Sure, they can do either one of these, but where I live, business owners are very vain, have little appreciation of art, but want to be seen as “sophisticated”; they love LLM immediacy, it’s almost magic to them, because they don’t have to come visit a print shop, tell what they want, then come back and be presented three different layout samples to choose from before final production.
What is Facebook like these days?
It’s a necessary evil in my country, and most of the local businesses I deal with are on FB. Half the time the content is really engagement garbage.
The power move was to tell the manager, and then leave afterwards without ordering anything.
Let them see the direct consequences of their actions, money walking out the door.
Even better: order something and then throw a tantrum that it looks nothing like the picture.
The service workers don’t deserve that, the manager might tho since they probably OK’d that menu
Yep, the pro move would be to wait for the food to come out; politely ask your server if you could speak to the manager about the discrepancy between the photos and the actual food; ream the manager loudly once they arrive; and then leave without eating or paying. Super pro move would be to leave a small tip for the server as well.
THAT TOTALLY LOOKS LIKE HUMAN FOOD WHICH I SHALL CONSUME WITH MY…FOOD PORT.
MHMMM. SUSTINANCE. YUM YUM.
YES. SUSTINANCE FOR YOUR MOIST MOUTH PORT. DISREGARD WHILE I WATCH YOU INSERT THINGS INSIDE.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
… I feel genuinely uncomfortable now
WHY ARE YOU YELING FELLOW HUMAN?
ERROR: The sharp edges of the pokey mesh-lattice have damaged the inner lining of my food port.
Gotta spring for the ceramic-plated food port, best decision of my life.
FOOD PORT ME BABY 🤖
Off topic I guess, but I was surprised that nobody is talking about the asterix: Eating undercooked food might make you sick. Like, yeah, that’s your job to avoid? I’m assuming this is about runny egg yolks but still, is this considered normal in the US?
idk if that’s normal in the US but it looks like a normal AI generated thingy to me. Like I’ve seen AI trying to tell you to be safe, consult real humans etc. quite a lot. So I assume that that’s just part of it.
Then again we’re talking about the country where lettuce isn’t safe to eat so…While I consider that statement normal, It is never something that is attached to every menu item.
First source I found from a search https://doh.vi.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Consumer-Advisory-for-Menus.pdf
Edit, another source with better examples https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/health/food/operators/consumer-advisory I am sure I could probably find something from the USDA or FDA ,but I already put too much effort into this.
It is standard for menus to have that asterisk next to food items whose doneness you get to choose. Mostly steaks and burgers.
Wait wtf?
Okay, I can see “runny yolk” as counting as undercooked, but a lot of those foods aren’t things that should be runny.
I hope no human actually typed this crap and it’s just something the AI decided to insert for reasons
If i remember correctly US has higher salmonella infection rates compared to the rest of the developed world
When cooking eggs sunny side up, I ALWAYS cook them with runny yolks. That’s how you retain the flavour. Been doing that forever, never a problem. Not in the USA.
Some look like plastic, some look like dogfood, and the second image is wigging out my trypophobia 🤮
What do you have against short-order cook M.C. Escher’s waffles?
Its extremely unpleasant. Why not use pictures of the food they actually have in the building? Even clip art or stock images would have been better.
“But making that food costs money! Getting ChatGPT to spit out a whole image costs me nothing, rather than the $1.30 it costs to whip up a plate of pancakes and an egg.”
Takeing good looking photos of food takes effort and time. Layouting takes time and effort and knowledhe of how to use (possibly paid) layouting software.
AI likely hands you a result in 5-10 minutes, compared to hours of work for a menu made traditionally.
Bad looking photos with a bad layout would look better than this.
Also, I bet they had an old menu before this and they threw it away.
I’ve seen these AI food menus all over the place here in Vancouver. It sucks.
Tell the owner’s and then leave. They’ll only get the message if they start losing money over it.
Those pictures make me feel like some decent psychedelics are about to kick in.
Old Neuralblender feel to it
That spelling of “omelette”
That’s just how it’s spelled in American English, unless I’m missing something.
Still made me sick
😂😂
It’s really not hard to do normally. Almost everybody has a smart phone with a reasonably good camera on it. Take a clean table, turn on all the lights, make each dish with a little extra care so it looks nice, and take a picture of it. You don’t even have to pay anybody.
That requires effort though, I want the computer to do it for me! The future is grim.
So don’t fucking eat there.
The food looks like the kind of thing that would be used as a lure by a massive carnivorous slime mold shaped like a mom and pop restaurant.
Weird things do grow in the hollers of Appalachia.
Sounds like you might enjoy a trip to Mystery Flesh Pit National Park!
Oh holy fuck.
The opposable thumbs on that bug. The stippled illustration. The… oh my god.
I’ll take my satisfaction in knowing this exists.
Thank you for this.
That’s when you let them know you’re walking out and why.
Yummy, I love eating nauseatingly detailed geometrical patterns 😋
I’m in Kenya at the moment and it seems nearly all restaurant menus are made with AI. It’s awful and I keep asking if the food is real as the photos aren’t.
