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 could get generating the layout, but the whole point of the pictures is that I want to see what your version of this dish looks like
No pictures at all would be vastly preferable. I’d’ve walked out.
and the manager/owner(?) who didn’t seem to care.
The owner. That’s the one who did it I bet anything. This is typical owner-type psychopathy. A manager would want customers at least. An owner thinks the money spawns in their bank account because they’re “good at runnin buisness.”
And not a single one of these pieces of shit ever admits to generating it. Its always “Oh uh is it AI though? Looks pretty real. How can you tell it’s AI? I’ll take your for it but I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s the future though so we might as well get used to it.”
Come on “AI artists” and “prompt engineers”. Why don’t you take credit for your “legitimate” work?
That shit looks so disgusting that it would ruin my appetite
Forget the visuals for a second and tell me how $17 for an omelette is anywhere near okay.
I live in a world where one pancake, 2 eggs and a few peices of bacon are $15. $15…
Looks like plates of alien organs.
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.
What, do you not flower cookie cutter your eggs and put stitch patterns on your pancakes? That’s how you know it’s made with love.
That’s how grandma used to prepare them with love!
WTF is “city ham”? Is that like “long pig”?
City ham is a slab of pink, what you might call a ham steak.
The alternative is Country ham, which is salt cured, and looks a bit like leather often with a round slice of the hambone.
Based on my experience at restaurants, anyway.
This person hams.
Oink oink, bitches
a slab of pink
You’re not making it any better!
Everything is ravioli.
You’re exactly right but I hadn’t noticed it.
I hate this even more now lol
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.
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.
That single word somehow completely encapsulates how these pictures look: eldritch.
Or just have a menu without photos like most normal restaurants?
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.
Honestly, taking a good enough picture of food is pretty easy, except when you want to be misleading.
Tricks like knowing exactly what you are allowed and not allowed to substitute for ‘better looking’. For example knowing you can substitute something for milk when taking picture of cereal, because something with glue ‘looks nicer’. Or carefully arranging the ingredients so that while the burger is technically using the same ingredients as what you get, the ingredients are all to one side so it looks like more from the angle of the camera.
For casually accurate pictures of a small restaurant menu, just take pictures in average lighting and it will be fine.
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.
Depends on the ‘food industry’.
Big chains, sure, they have photographers come in.
The little chinese restauraunt near me, clearly they just snapped pictures of their food with smartphones and slapped them on the board. Their printed menu was just text. I suspect if this is a small restaurant, they probably just had text on menu, and thought AI could give them ‘big restaurant’ menu impression, but instead got horror show of crap. They probably could have provided some pictures and directed it to make a menu layout but do not generate images, but use these pictures.
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.
Most restaurants don’t even have a picture of the food, especially when the menu is really simple like this.
I mean honestly I’ve ordered plenty of food from text only menus and relied on ingredient descriptions to help me decide. I’m only disappointed when they give me something that is very against the platonic ideal of whatever they described. (I’m sorry but deep fried scones are a step too far away from egg battered bread for me to call it French toast)
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.
Stock fotos. Cost a bit, but look great.
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.
I’m curious. Why do you assume the restaurant owner must be older? What is the cause of “diffusion blindness” and how does it relate to a person’s age? IOW considering that these AI images are relatively new, common and widespread in less than the last 10 years or so, they are of the same “newness” to most people, certainly to all adults.
So, above what age would a person be susceptible to “diffusion blindness”, and why that particular age? Could it be related to the number of years lived before the rise of so many AI images? It seems to me that the more years lived before the influx of AI images, the weirder they would seem, so that the older a person, the more likely they would be to find the images bizarre and unnatural. Or do I have it backwards, and if so, please explain.
Much of social media these days is starting from “old people bad”, and working backwards from there. Including accusations that it’s only old people on Facebook engaging in nonsense. Absolutely no self awareness there at all.
What is Facebook like these days?
From what I have seen, it’s bottom-barrel diffusion/LLM generated engagement farming. Thirst posts, political ragebait, AI Jesus, trippy nonsense; basically anything to farm likes, which users apparently like in aggregate.
It’s notably more obvious than most social media. It’s even more obvious than Instagram, with its flood of bot influencers linking to autogenerated OnlyFans pages/chats.
On top of this, it’s basically the only place Meta can push Muse, as there is little interest in it elsewhere.
Oof. Glad I got rid of it then. Once the algorithm got rid of every friends post on my feed, there wasn’t really any point anymore.
Except Facebook Marketplace, which has a stranglehold on local listings :(
Not that I have used it, but it’s very tempting.
I did use Facebook marketplace once for Mario Kart 64. Movers stole my N64 when I was a kid and that game is a motherfucker to find these days without paying $80+.
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.
When I gave up Reddit cold turkey for APIpocalypse, I started browsing Facebook as mindless scrolling content.
And yes, I know, it’s worse than Reddit for a lot of reasons.
There’s a ton of AI slop on it. Los of repost bots. Lots of low effort culture war nonsense.
Outside of good Facebook groups, it’s mostly straight garbage. But, I kinda appreciate being able to see what the normies are seeing.
Maybe they just need to put on their glasses
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?
Yeah, it’s very common on menus in the U.S. because we’re a bunch of litigious assholes and weird legal disclaimers disclaimers are sprinkled around our country like magic spells to ward off the lawyers representing narcissists.
I have no idea if that little warning has ever actually been tested in court in a food-borne illness case to see if it works, though. Businesses can’t always just waive customer safety liabilities away with finely-printed incantations.
Also, it doesn’t make sense to have the asterisk on stuff like the biscuits and gravy, only items where the customer picks the “doneness” like eggs or steak. WTF wouldn’t be fully cooked in biscuits and gravy? And if they’re going to do this stupid shit, it should also be on the “country ham breakfast” that comes with “two eggs any style,” since it’s on all the other egg items.
It is standard for menus to have that asterisk next to food items whose doneness you get to choose. Mostly steaks and burgers.
Litigation heavy society + Governmental food safety guidelines.
Every menu in the us that has options for even slightly pink burgers, eggs, ceviche, sushi, or anything else not cooked to federal food safety minimums has that disclaimer on the menu.
We all know it, there’s no reason for it other than perceived cheap lawsuit protection.
Thing is, if the food was stored negligently that message won’t stop them from being liable. And if the food was stored properly, the chances of contamination are pretty damned low.
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…It’s a legal disclaimer so they don’t get sued
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.
Both your sources seem to suggest marking each applicable food item with the asterisk and having a disclaimer at the bottom, though.
I’m noticing now that the AI menu seems inconsistent in following these guidelines: No asterix for “Country Ham Breakfast” while “Pancake Combo” has one; both are served with eggs. Not to mention that I feel that the eggs themselves is what should be marked, unless undercooked pancakes and such is a thing?
I agree, very inconsistent markings. And it should be the eggs themselves.
If i remember correctly US has higher salmonella infection rates compared to the rest of the developed world
I can’t find any comparative data on this. Did you mean in people, in chickens or in chicken products (might be all three I suppose, since eggs are a major culprit)?
I’m sure I read somewhere that it’s partially due to the fact that in the US chickens are not immunised.
I found something on Wikipedia (under Prevention, Vaccine pertaining to this:
A 2014 study tested a vaccine on chickens which offered efficient protection against salmonellosis.[45]
Vaccination of chickens against Salmonella essentially wiped out the disease in the United Kingdom[citation needed]. A similar approach was considered in the United States, but the Food and Drug Administration decided not to mandate vaccination of hens.[46]
I’d assume it’s not a widespread practice globally from that wording?
I think you might be right. Strange though, I remember being a kid in the 90s/00s and nibbling on food that had raw egg and I don’t think I got sick. I guess my parents were just letting me rawdog it.
I’d assume the risk is low, or we wouldn’t have these serving practices. I assume most chickens (and eggs) aren’t contaminated with Salmonella - it’s only a problem if you happen to have an undercooked one that does. I guess it helps if you feel confident your government is on top of the issue and will warn you if there’s an outbreak.
I noticed that too… that asterisk makes me feel pretty grossed out, and seems like such an ai addition to a menu.
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
“Runny yolks” was just my writing, though. You can see the asterix disclaimer at the bottom of the menu - it’s wording is reasonable. (I would have typed it out for you, but that’s way too much effort on mobile)
I know, what I mean is, there’s an asterisk on items like “biscuits and gravy”
Why the fuck are they undercooking biscuits and gravy? Do people want their biscuits done over-easy?
Oh yeah, I noticed that too. Doesn’t really make sense, no.
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.
Runny yolks are normal in the US too. This disclaimer exists on pretty much every menu in the US.
I think that’s pretty normal outside of Salmonella outbreaks - the problem in the US being that they wouldn’t necessarily know there’s an outbreak in time to stop people getting exposed. You might therefore want to be careful about making it sound like a zero risk choice rather than a low risk one.
I genuinely don’t understand how they always manage to generate the worst possible image. It takes effort to get such horrible results out of any modern VLM/image gen.
why does the food look disgusting
