Restaurants using AI for food menu is a sign of bad quality.
The best pizza I ever had was from a hole-in-the-wall place in Montreal with a layer of grease in the windows, thick cobwebs covered in dead flies, and an air-conditioner black with mold.
If anyone cares, or remembers, it was Rock And Roll Pizza on Bleury, where the Spectrum used to be. In front of the NYKS.
It was a Persian guy running the place. One day I convinced a Persian co-worker to eat there. I guess he gave shit to the owner because the next day the place was a lot cleaner.
Basically they made some kind of shawarma pizza that was out of this world.
Oh and the business next door sold sex dolls, there was a fully inflated transexual doll in that window.
I miss that Montreal. I don’t like the crappy generic condo abomination that’s there now.
So anyways, if greasy windows and dead spiders didn’t turn me off, what does it say that seeing some generic gross AI art turns me off?
(I just remembered another MTL pizza place with greasy windows and dead flies that was so amazing a guy drove from the South Shore just to eat there.)
I also miss when cities weren’t condo oblivions and had character. I really felt this. And the pizza sounded amazing BTW.
Montreal is just becoming a densified condo tower hellscape.
There’s a place near me that made amazing chicken parmigiana, pasta, and pizzas. Went back recently and they’ve replaced their entire menu with nonsense ai slop. Got a pizza anyway and it was awful, literally had a chunk of bone left in the toppings.
Why? Do you assume that means there are robots in the kitchen?
I think it’s a sign that they don’t have their own marketing department.
And their prices are 15-30% higher than any place else. And their customer service sucks. And the only employees are high school kids because they only pay minimum wage. And their hours are 8:30 am - 4:30 pm, Mon-Fri, so you have to take time off work just to go there.
At least that’s how it is for me where I live. It’s a wonder any of them are still in business. The saddest part is, most of them say shit like, “Well at least we don’t have Bidenomics to worry about anymore. Things were way worse then.”
I expect higher prices when I’m trying to shop local. I know they can’t compete on price. I’m willing to pay the premium specifically to support small business.
Sure, restricted hours kind of suck, but like…I’m not going to hold wanting to find work/life balance against them.
Customer service is hit or miss anywhere. Really, I think the idea of customer service has mostly gone out the window everywhere. It sucks because HS kids (and anyone else working these jobs) aren’t being taught these skills. With a small business, at least I can have a nice little conversation with the owner even if they’re socially awkward. People skills are hard. Obviously there is a line in there somewhere that goes into shitty service or bad attitude.
I do plenty of shopping at chains, but it’s important to me to throw money at small businesses. I’ve watched my city grow a lot in the last 30 years and the only thing keeping it interesting are the local businesses.
I mean, I still shop those places when I can. But it’s usually extra effort for a worse experience.
And the checkout system is an iPad. With tip prompt, even if it’s just a store.
I’ve seen some places being more self conscious about this lately and no longer do the tip prompt (or literally pick up the thing themselves and hit “no tip” before handing it over).
Which goes to show that shame can still move the needle sometimes.
The worst is food places. Motherfucker, I don’t need to see a representation of what pepperoni pizza looks like. I already know what pepperoni pizza looks like.
I want to see what your pepperoni pizza looks like.
It’s worse when their menu pictures have the glitch where it makes things look like triptaphobia? I forget how it’s spelled and I’m not going to look it up for obvious reasons…
Trypophobia? Went to a restaurant that had ai menu pictures that looked like everything was made of bugs. They looked absolutely disgusting. At that point it wasn’t even about not liking ai, i simply lost my apetite looking at it.
That’s the one. Same reaction. They’re lucky I didn’t puke lol
It’s like they all use one model that can’t figure out french fries, hash browns, or lettuce.
This place has a $35 crab cake sandwich on the menu and can’t manage to take a picture of the fucking thing.
Yeah. Reminds me of this place that tried to advertise their opening on a small sub on Reddit. So they’re opening in six months, have entirely generated website, and have the gall to put two posts on the front page. Like I said this was a very small sub. So of course we roasted the shit out of them. I think my favorite was, anyone want to place bets on how fast they’ll close?
Waffles. AI waffles always looked so cursed.
Oh yeah. I think that was the place I had in mind. Some sort of breakfast place and I had to just close it.
Oh yeah like it generates the images all roughly textured? I think it’s like a reaction to generated images usually looking too smooth, but they just ended up deep frying them in uncanny.
That’s what you get when you use ai to upscale ai images.
Supporting a small business with an AI Poster is much better than supporting a big corporation
Why? Isn’t the small business supporting a big AI corporation? So a big corporation is getting supported either way?
Small businesses aren’t inherently cool and good, many of them would prefer to be large corporations, they just don’t know how to get there.
Creating an AI Poster might literally just be one month of some $5 AI sub or a free trial. There’s no way to verify how much they’re actually supporting the AI Company.
And while your second point is valid, if you really cared about supporting local you’d simply do some research on which local businesses are running with a community-centric approach. Which ones are run by decent people. Etc. That will likely but not definitely exclude businesses that use AI anyway.
I’d also just rather support a local shithead than a billionaire shithead 🤷
I did let a place I go semi regularly know that I choose not to eat dessert recently because their dessert menu had all AI images. The next time I was there the specials were just text (like their standard menu)
I hate even more that I get there and they tell me “you know you can get it cheaper on Amazon” or “we no longer stock it but you can get it on Amazon”. Bud, I can get every single thing in your store on Amazon and yes, it is often cheaper but I am trying to keep local stores and local jobs alive.
This happened to me a few weeks ago when I was looking through thrift shops to put together a Halloween costume. I went looking store to store for overalls, asked the employees if they had any suggestions. The elderly ladies had legit suggestions (that simply didn’t work out for me), but the young staff just went, “Try Amazon?”
The sad truth is, the youngin’s never lived in a world without Amazon. They don’t know the local stores like the older folks do. Perhaps they’ve never gone from thrift store to thrift store looking for treasures (even if they work in a thrift store.) It’s possible the idea of “avoiding Amazon” has never occurred to them.
Perhaps they’ve never gone from thrift store to thrift store looking for treasures (even if they work in a thrift store.)
That’s crazy. But on the bright side, that means they’re not poaching all the good shit as soon as it arrives lol
employees justifiably hate their employers
and small businesses typically abuse their employees far worse than mega corps which is saying something in a world of Walmarts and Amazon’s
the sweet spot is a company that’s small enough to maintain a culture and the owners still have a vision but big enough they have to follow the rules pay taxes and have an hr department
of course there is no ethical consumption or production under capitalism but I didn’t create this world just suffering along with everyone else
Sweet spot is shops that require staff with some level of skills or knowledge which makes them a bit more difficult to replace.
Some stores don’t understand that they can’t just sell the high margin stuff. They have to also sell the high volume/low margin stuff that generates the foot traffic.
If I stop going to your store for 98% of my shopping, why would I go there for the last 2%?
It’s like when I go to vendor halls at conventions and half the vendors are repackaged aliexpress/temu items
It’s like when I go to
vendor halls at conventions and half the vendorsany store that’s not a mega-department store all the items are repackaged aliexpress/temu itemsftfy
TBH, the US has been middle-manning economically depressed labor for cheap goods for decades. It just turns out that China is way better at it than we are.
Alibaba/express just made it a marketplace where companies could do it with zero friction.
I’m fine with the massive Chinese booths like that at our flea market. We get some useful stuff for cheap. But in general it turns me off. Our local Goodwills now sell bottom-of-the-barrel Chinese imports for the same prices as the next better sort of thing.
It would bother me too.
But not to the point of withdrawing my support, assuming their business has nothing to do with IT and AI otherwise.
Doing your posters with AI nowadays is the same as using ClipArt+ComicSans in days of yore.
OK, it’s not exactly the same. So then I’d have explain it to them. “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”That said, I rarely support business just because it’s local and small. There needs to be at least one more reason. I have seen too many local & small businesses & owners that exploit and pollute and corrupt just like their big counterparts.
They never built a clip art data center in my backyard.
Plus you still had to creative use the clip art. So there was human assembly there. Plus a human most definitely created the clip art in the first place.
So overall, not really the same
There needs to be some respectful images that you can reply with on social media when you see local businesses using AI images just to make the point that if they wont hire local for their advertising why should I shop local to keep them in business.
If we talk about groceries - from my experience there’s no reason to shop at big chains if there is a farmers market nearby. I bring my own reusable packaging for solid stuff and bottles for milk and juice. And people who run it are usually chill and just doing their thing.
But as we venture into tech territory - it becomes really muddy, many of people running small IT businesses in here are pompous arses. Like dude runs some musty basement and thinks of himself a Bill Gates.
milk seems to be much cheaper and available in skim varieties from the big chains as opposed to smaller stores, I still mostly shop at the smaller store though because it has cheaper vegetables and better meat
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Well, we here have a situation, where giving soapy baths to pigs (yes, that’s the job) at local farm may earn one 3 times the salary of entry IT job. Simply because it’s that hard to find workers these days, and don’t get me started on actual technical jobs - it’s near impossible to find a lathe machinist today.
So yeah, it all… depends… And yeah, there is one local business that I avoid, because it’s run by a guy associated with local conspiracy theorist clown. So yeah, I do little investigations to make sure I don’t give money to people who will then use it to make world a worse place.
At the risk of being down voted to oblivion, I don’t mind if they use AI to touch up actual photos of their food, like improve background , lighting etc.
Note the photo has to be original though.
However, if they use AI to generate the whole photo, that’s a problem.
Damn I’m missing that “ugly” stuff made in Paint and typed in Comic Sans more and more every day.
If I see AI posters, menus, or signage, I don’t spend money. Period.
Eh. They think it’s much better than what they had, and probably can’t tell it’s AI generated. They paid a local “graphic designer” or even had their kid do it.
The more “mom and pop” they are, the more I forgive them.
Local chain restaurants should know better than to use AI images on their menu, though. Not that I eat out anymore.
Recently saw an AI photobooth. No one was using it, they were taking their own pictures instead.
Why the fuck would I pay you to stick a prompt in when I could do it myself if I really wanted an AI generated picture? You may have cut some of your costs, but now your final product has no value to it.
What’s an AI photobooth? I’m just imagining a booth where you have your photo taken and it prints a totally unrelated AI-generated photo. Like, you go for a passport photo and get a picture of Marie Curie and the Hulk windsurfing on the Moon.
Your imagination of it is pretty spot on tbh
That’s the thing that really gets me about these folks.
You slop up something for yourself and you are happy with it, ok.
But then you expect me to engage/pay for your zero-effort AI output that I could have just gotten myself direct from the same place you did? Why?
You are not alone. Its a surefire way of telling me they do not give a shit about their business. Its honestly nice that AI makes it easier to spot ;)