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.

AI menus and signage are quickly becoming the dog whistle for "cheap". It's telling you what kind of quality and service you should expect in the rest of their product or service. Pretty soon people will catch on, and start avoiding these places. Once that happens, generative AI image models will be hard-pressed to drop the association. It's like walking into a dollar store -- everything can be made cheaply, so it doesn't matter if something there is actually of any value.

I've come around to the other side of this in a way. I used to think "wow they don't care at all" the same way I previously looked at menus clearly made in MS Word: The place will probably be cheap and they don't care about having fancy menu design.

From there, it's two possibilities:

-They care about the food at the expensive of design and it's going to be cheap and great (good) -They care about the food as much as the design and it's going to suck (bad)

This switch happened after a new place opened in my neighborhood that had AI signage and is now my favorite lunch spot.

There are a lot of these on websites too. There was a design that was pretty good back in the day, but lately I've been getting quite a few requests to change it to the trendy Linear-style AI design. As more sites use AI-generated images, I think some people have come to see that as the trend

Hand-made comfort food will be as much a luxury as hand-made menus.

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.

I do miss tacky, over-styled menus sometimes. Doesn't excuse the fake food pictures though.

I think the Japanese laws requiring strict truth in food advertising would be a good transplant.

We have RUINED the food industry. It started with gig-work delivery. Restaurants will never recover from GrubHub and ghost kitchens. Food quality and service died years ago.

Now, they don't have to pay for or manage delivery people, or pay anyone to make their menus for them.

There are no consequences to lying. People have a bad experience sure, but they'll forget next time they order off grubhub and simply search for "burrito near me" and click on the first good looking food.

We always expect what was promised to be different than what was delivered to some degree, but I'm not sure restaurants have fully weighed the expectations-vs-reality backlash this may cause... uncannily-wrong details aside for a sec, the AI pics always set michelin-level presentation expectations. The final promise-vs-plate pics in this post were pretty dramatic.

There's always a class of restaurants where they don't care about repeat visitors. Think the cafe in front of a major tourist attraction: every day brings a new busload of 1-time patrons, those will always want the michelin-level pics to bait the 1-time foot-traffic in. The danger is the neighborhood mom-and-pops will start using the same trick without understanding they need repeat customers, and repeat disappointment kills a repeat audience.

But who knows... people with a TV budget have been using glue in their cheesy pizza commercials, soap in their beer glass foam, and motor oil on their pancake stacks for a long time -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k7PJoNAXkk -- maybe this is just equalizing the enshittified food playing field.

I think if you showed these before/after menus to people from 5 years ago, most would tell you it’s a massive improvement.

But now many of us have been trained to detect slop from miles away so it just comes across as cheap.

I often feel the same way when I glance at a project’s documentation and it’s long and full of markdown styles and emojis: “the author didn’t think about the users at all, they just wanted to get this over with quickly, so now I have to be super suspicious of everything I read here and it might end up being a huge waste of my time”. A few years ago I’d probably think “wow, emojis!”

There is this new thing where people love to show off their sophistication that they can "spot AI". Every time they see an a Claudeism, every time they see an emdash, they talk about how they feel sick to their stomach and are ready to boycott the business that may or may not be guilty of the high crime of using a computer tool.

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.

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.

It'd be one thing if it was just the problem of a generic AI slop graphic design that all looks the same, the problem is when it generates pictures of food that literally looks disgusting. I've seen some of these posted online where the food literally looks like it's infected (fries with weird black splotches), or the jalapeños look like tires, and it all triggers trypophobia.

Well at least the peas weren't upside down...

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

Nothing says delicious meal like the liberal application of the AI image piss filter

I'm fascinated by how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising in seemingly just the last six months - presumably because ChatGPT Images and Gemini Nano Banana finally got good enough at outputting text without obvious defects in the typography.

The posters all look good - much better than their desktop publishing predecessors. And yet they also eat away at the credibility of the event or business for me.

It's hard to trust a poster when the quality of the design has zero relation to the amount of effort that went into creating it.

But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds?

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, good sign of a place to avoid.