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  • Hacker News
  • My personal opinion is that these days most people simply wouldn’t be able to tell that the photos are AI generated, and even if they could, they wouldn’t care or have any strong thoughts about it. I don’t think my parents or any adults aged 50+ in my family have spent any time at all playing around with AI image generation tools or comparing AI-generated images to non-AI-generated images to be able to have any opinions about these things.

    So until more people frequenting restaurants care it’s a relatively low risk and low cost way to update your menu.

    by _override
  • Senior citizens are the most vulnerable
    by reactordev
  • Clocked this a while ago, crazy how the smell of the same model they're using is so distinct that entire areas of town are starting to look homogenous.

    Someones definitely going to write a think piece about how this erases aesthetic identity of cities and cultures.

    Looks like absolute ass too, easily beaten even by something designed by someone completely naive to design/art, good sign of a place to avoid.

    by whywhywhywhy
  • But consider how, in just a short few years, tools will have changed so much that even achieving this specific look will not even be possible (everything is in the cloud and normal users can’t even run them locally)

    We’ll inevitably end up feeling nostalgic for these mid-2020s AI slop menus, much like how graphic design of the 90s and 2000s is revered (see other comments on this post) even while during its making was regarded as garish

    by ivan888
  • I live in Brazil, and on our delivery apps (like iFood), AI photos have become a plague. It's so bad seeing pictures with that distinct GPT look. You just don't know what your rice and beans will look like.
    by hei-lima
  • In the US, some of those apps were generating gross nonsense like showing an image of a pizza with a sweet pie filling (because the menu said “pizza pie”).

    I don’t get how AI images like this don’t open them up to false advertising lawsuits

    by mjhay
  • I think 5 years ago, we'd just have thought this was a "badly designed menu" and moved on, but now AI has taught us to feel a deep sense of disappointment with it's particular blend of poor personality-less design.

    I was looking at the documentation for cruft the other day and it's mascot is absolutely glorious. Not because it displays any semblance of "good taste", but just because it is the polar opposite of AI generated blandness[0].

    Who knows - maybe in the future we'll start embracing signals of human amateurishness and ms-paint created menus filled with comic sans will take off.

    [0] https://cruft.github.io/cruft/

    by benrutter
  • The AI overreaction is people extrapolating change forward in a linear fashion, not unlike the nightly news scarily reporting about some "trend" sweeping the nation (rainbow parties, polygamy, whatever), playing on people's fear that inevitably it is going to consume society.

    This restaurant probably has the "tech nephew" who played around with ChatGPT and they thought it looks fresh and new or something, and they probably said "ha and we didn't have to pay anyone!". And while it looks bad to us, for a while it will look "good" and "professional" to a lot of people.

    But eventually so many will have this same look that the whiplash will occur, everyone will reject it, and like you said then the differentiation will be the least AI looking.

    by llm_nerd
  • Low effort products will be used by low effort companies. In the case of restaurants, this might not necessarily be bad - I’ve been to amazing taco/burrito shops w abysmal menus. But if I went to a “high end” place with an AI menu and instagram decor - bad, bad sign.

    I genuinely think AI companies need to worry more about their brand. Just through how their products are used, they are perceived as a marker for low quality.

    by biophysboy
  • > But if I went to a “high end” place with an AI menu and instagram decor - bad, bad sign.

    Sometimes I wonder if this will settle into its own form of kitsch over the years, and whether people will someday try to emulate it (with a wink and a nod).

    by mlekoszek
  • Anthropic has been running the exact same video ad in my youtube feed for months showing a guy making the tackiest "impossible" coffee table hanging from chains that I wouldn't even bother clicking on if it were a thumbnail from a favorite woodworker. I'd think if ChatGPT were such a great creative tool they could use it to create more than one ad....
    by ghostly_s
  • There’s a lot of times I see people reaching for AI instead of taking a photograph, this is super egregious when it’s meant as a reference, because the AI generated image won’t necessarily look like the real thing. I’ve seen it used in reference documents about animal management/veterinary reference meant for farmers, and the generated cows, horses and so on are just worse than the original version that was done with photos, they may look more “clean”, but farm life isn’t meant to be clean and it also lost the veterinarian that was shown in the shots manipulating the animal and properly indicating with hands where to pay attention in the animal.
    by a1o
  • GPT-Image has that horrible deep-fried look to it. Can't draw anything without looking like it's got grit thrown over the whole image. Nano Banana is much, much better here, it's often hard to tell if it's fake.

    Apart from that image generation is just the wrong idea for flyers since the resolution they put out is never enough for 300 DPI, the image always looks low-quality, the edges of the text are blurry and so on. Also the fact that the images in the picture look nothing like the real thing is unethical.

    I think you could have an AI system that makes menus correctly: the restaurant would take (amateur) pictures of all their menu items, give the system the names, descriptions, prices and so on, then the agent could use Nano Banana or something like that to give the images consistent lighting and angles, use a different model to remove the backgrounds and then write a menu in the desired sizes using HTML. That way the text could be perfect, the images could look like what you actually get.

    by joegibbs
  • Well at least the peas weren't upside down...

    https://preview.redd.it/the-peas-are-upside-down-v0-5pwo713b...

    by _joel
  • I don't think that's AI. It looks more like crappy photoshop.
    by huhkerrf
  • M.C. Escher opens a restaurant.
    by qingcharles
  • This is incredibly good stuff.
    by pelagicAustral
  • This is unironically soulful though.
    by whywhywhywhy
  • looks like every kebab shop menu near me. All offerings crudely cut/pasted/mashed together. 5 near me literally have the same menu with different prices and a colour theme to match their (usually terrible, 3-D font effect from 90's era Corel Draw) Logo. And they were like that BEFORE GenAI got popular!
    by abrugsch
  • I do think that AI signage/advertising is the new signifier of low-effort, low-skill output and that is how it will be perceived by clientele.

    Similar to someone just scrawling a sandwich board sign in chalk (which at this point I would prefer).

    Businesses will stand out from a taste perspective by continuing to hire human effort to make recognisable human output.

    by gegtik
  • Escaping AI slop will become a privilege for the wealthy.
    by Jtarii
  • > Similar to someone just scrawling a sandwich board sign in chalk

    As opposed to what? This is usually a sign of quality. If it’s in chalk it’s because it changes as the restaurant experiments and tries new things.

    by cautiouscat
  • Writing in signs and menus in chalk has been a signal for a high quality restaurant for as long as I can remember. With photos of the food, and/or ring bound menus being the worst.
    by dec0dedab0de
  • 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.
    by diabllicseagull
  • My first thought was that the simplified illustrations of the dishes actually make for quickly finding something, or familiarizing yourself with new foods.
    by gblargg
  • 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.

    by jrmg
  • 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.
    by delfinom
  • 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.
    by juggle-anyhow
  • 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.

    by XorNot
  • 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.

    by cautiouscat