Threatening people is unwarranted, but of course people are allowed to choose where they buy coffee for whatever reasons they see fit. If the market decides that stores with AI posters aren't the place to be then the business has to adapt.

Live by the slop, die by the slop.

> Then came a threat. An account with a much larger following DM'd her and told her to take down the sign, or they would post about it to their local artist community. The person offered to help her find an artist to pay to make a new sign, or else they would post about it.

> They gave her a day to "think about it."

When this is sort of behavior that the "good guys" advance then it's hard not to expect a "bad guy" with money to show up on the scene and thwart it.

Im shocked she spent so much to get it printed. The design looks so cheap

I would definitely be less likely to buy food/drink from a place with AI ads (because I don't trust that what they're advertising would correspond to what they're selling), but I can't imagine threatening someone over it.

The reaction folks had is OTT, but it does look like AI slop.

One group of folks is trying to say we basically have AGI. The other group is pointing to AI that remains very limited and where lowly humans can spot anything it’s created from a mile away. The evidence continues to point towards the later.

> "Endeladyze said she felt terrible that she had upset her customers, but she was also frustrated at the idea that she should have been paying a real artist. Making these signs was a job only she had done herself or with employees in the past, never hiring outsiders."

This seems like the wrong attitude to take after experiencing such a backlash. If she'd made the signs herself for years then why resort to using AI to produce what is so obviously a generic slop result?

The article says she paid $150 for printing and $200 for a stand. Why not throw another $200 towards an artist?

This isn’t really about AI, it’s about a culture where threats and coercion in service of one’s own ideology have become normalised.

My basic stance these days is 'if you were too lazy to do this yourself and handed it off to ai then why should i be motivated to engage with it'

This primarily, for me, has resulted in me ignoring a lot of long winded tickets.

the user a generate's email/documentation/whatever via claude > sent to user b > user b uses claude to summarize it ... loop is shitty.

This applies less to me for code as long as you are reviewing it throughly and 'sculpting' it throughly to make it readable/maintainable.

Care about your work if you want me to care about your work.

I've noticed a very sudden uptick in these AI designed signs and menus in my area. I fully understand why they are used by small business owners (fast and cheap), and I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction.

That said, my own aesthetic sense is very much turned off by them. It is hard for me to articulate why, but I can name four reasons:

- The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious;

- The information is presented in a haphazard way, with text randomly thrown all over the place;

- There is really only one kind of "style" of these signs that I've seen, and it's sad to think that this style (or lack thereof) may become ubiquitous;

- In a world where AI feels increasingly shoved down our throats, it is unnerving to so suddenly see its rise manifested in the physical world.

> She was up during the night pumping for her three-month-old baby and was scrolling through the comments and DMs, horrified. "At 4 a.m., I was holding my pump on my lap and replying to this person, 'I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it that way,'" she told me. "I was so into typing this message that I produced so much milk, it was dripping

Articles like this always rub me the wrong way. I don't know the term for it, but I feel you should be able to make the point without making us picture a new mother getting stressed breast pumping in the middle of the night.

The article contains a rather beautiful example done via camera (and product photography demands that you get the froth and lighting just in time and just right) decorated by an artistic employee.

The owner had to resort to her standby Canva when the employee left, but lacking time due to a newborn.

To me, having followed all kinds of embedded links over to Vermont and Germany, the latter example being extraordinarily unappetizing. [0]

Stepping back to get the big picture, it seems to me that small business owners have gotten spoiled by local artists and artistic employees who created really beautiful signs and brochures. Come crunch time, it's either pay a local artist or DIY. And to get "pretty" artwork, many resort to AI, which mostly ain't pretty, sometimes pretty grotesque.

But this seems to be a case of wanting things both ways. AI is famous for really bizarre food rendering, as exhibited below. Customers really want food and preparation to look real. So why not set up a simple grid (say, Pages on a mac or Libre Office or Scribus) and pair the best photo you can grab with a description opposite it, on a nice background?

Other than KISS, you can get excellent art for a price, or slop for cheap (or at least, artificial art that advertises itself as such).

Increasing costs affect not only businesses, but people needing work, some of whom have lost jobs and income, are understandably upset.

The workflow I described can be done for little cost if DIY is not suitable, perhaps even a local photography class (who would work for (coffee) beans?)

I refer friends learning photography, intrigued by their phone cameras, and wanting to expand their skill set, to community college and other classes. Maybe even one of those starving artists.

Businesses brag about sourcing locally. I see a way to do so, but good art requires good artists, just as product photography requires some skill.

You can't have it all, or damn cheap. You must choose wisely.

P.S. My Dad was a commercial artist and I am an amateur photographer. And I make my own coffee. Yikes, the cost. If it's atmosphere, do put some nice art on the walls and let the product speak for itself.

My two cents, or "Sixbucks" worth.

[0] https://x02.me/i/F7ZX6.jpeg

I do have compassion for people who are not tech oriented. AI art can seems a bit kitsch and novel at first, and they probably don't really think about ethical consequences very deeply.

The problem is it all looks the same, and those of us who are terminally online are exposed to it non-stop. AI slop seems to be poisoning every space that used to have quality conversations, and mass un-employing many creative professions.

People do have the right to vote with their feet though - it is perfectly ethical to support coffee shops that support the local artist community and avoid ones with AI "art". Too bad we've mostly lost the ability to rationally discuss things, instead of resorting to threats right off the bat.

As an artist, or software engineer for that matter, you do not have an inalienable right to be paid for something that can be automated through AI.

I'm willing to bet most of these people don't even patronize her store because they are terminally online unemployed losers who can't afford more than freeze-dried Folgers.

Never let the mob win. They don't deserve her coffee, good riddance.

If you are sending threats to strangers on social media you are at minimum mentally ill, she has something to gain by losing them as customers.

Small businesses barely get by. Someone with work as transient as "artist" should know better.

Makes me wonder what constitutes a bigger danger for the society: putting up a bad taste AI-generated menu poster, or threatening people’s businesses for that action.

"AI-generated" looks bad to a large minority of people. It is not clear if the majority notices, much less cares.

That aside, if you spend 5 minutes prompting AI, you can create an image that no one will clock as AI.

The owner's instagram apology post has a bunch of "I did not understand..."s and language about disrespect, etc-- which makes sense, they're trying to get out of trouble, but it is in a way dishonest. Things would be better if they felt they could write "I didn't realize you all hated this. Now that I know, I'll take it down. Sorry about that." because it avoids them feeling they were threatened into "falling into line". As it stands they were forced to lie to get out of trouble about something they didn't even realize was wrong (they don't actually care about AI, obviously, or they wouldn't have used it), and they are necessarily bitter as a result.

Not that they were in a position to figure that out, in the moment, but I think it is a good thing to take away from the story... The interpretation of transgressions as moral failures instead of mistakes has done a lot of harm to society in the past few decades, because it creates bitter people instead of resolving things cleanly. It's a failure of the whole norm around these things, rather than any individual per se; people are rarely in the position to realize their behavior is contributing to a toxic norm on a daily level.