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’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.
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.
Or just have a menu without photos like most normal restaurants?
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.
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.
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.
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+.
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.
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.
Maybe they just need to put on their glasses
The power move was to tell the manager, and then leave afterwards without ordering anything.
Let them see the direct consequences of their actions, money walking out the door.
Even better: order something and then throw a tantrum that it looks nothing like the picture.
The service workers don’t deserve that, the manager might tho since they probably OK’d that menu
Yep, the pro move would be to wait for the food to come out; politely ask your server if you could speak to the manager about the discrepancy between the photos and the actual food; ream the manager loudly once they arrive; and then leave without eating or paying. Super pro move would be to leave a small tip for the server as well.
THAT TOTALLY LOOKS LIKE HUMAN FOOD WHICH I SHALL CONSUME WITH MY…FOOD PORT.
MHMMM. SUSTINANCE. YUM YUM.
YES. SUSTINANCE FOR YOUR MOIST MOUTH PORT. DISREGARD WHILE I WATCH YOU INSERT THINGS INSIDE.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
… I feel genuinely uncomfortable now
WHY ARE YOU YELING FELLOW HUMAN?
FOOD PORT ME BABY 🤖
ERROR: The sharp edges of the pokey mesh-lattice have damaged the inner lining of my food port.
Gotta spring for the ceramic-plated food port, best decision of my life.
That shit doesn’t even look like food.
The trouble with food that looks like that, you have to keep an eye on it. Whenever you look elsewhere there’s a faint rustling noise, you catch a rapid movement in your peripheral vision and look back, only to see it has taken a different form. Chances are all the photos on the menu were actually the same dish. Is it alive? Is it sentient? Is it one organism or many? Such questions lose their meaning with food like this.
Oh and don’t eat it because you won’t be human any more
Eating this food will give you eyes on the inside.
the biscuits and gravy looks like dog biscuits… they are little bones, or somewhat resemble then anyways.
This is some sloppy slop.
Anyone that cares this little about how their food is represented before ordering, doesn’t care about the food or customer. It saved the owner $50 one time, and that was worth it.
Sorry, Riverstone Restaurant, but fuck off with this.
I agree with this wholeheartedly.
How hard is it to take a picture of the food after it’s been prepared??? God damn…
Not that I’m on their side, but it can take a lot of prep and experience to take good food pics. Now having said that, often my favorite places have pictures that are decades old and faded, and probably weren’t great pictures to begin with.
yeah it takes prep and time, unless you just take pics of the food you’re vending and be honest.
there’s an idea. just advertise what you’re selling. wild huh?
anyway, both prepared pics and casual shots are better than literal fucking nightmare fuel.
I hear this said so often. But at the same time, sharing photos of your meal on social media is pretty popular and it still makes people call it out as looking delicious. Those photos are usually very amateur, but look better than anything on many food menus even before all the slop.
That’s a bit harsh. A lot of the pictures you see on menus are not what they cooked in the kitchen. Because cooked food doesn’t look sexy enough. Or only when it’s hot and then steam coming off it makes it look worse in the image. So they use glue to gloss things up, replace entire ingredients (e.g. motor oil for maple syrup), etc. Food photography is serious business. And expensive.
I agree that’s the way it’s “always” done, but I disagree that it’s the only way it can be done, or that it’s even the best way to do it for a Mom&Pop joint. See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asDjcgiwIiY
yeah, I’ve been shooting my own images for the mealie i setup and even perfectly arranging the plate and putting all the kitchen lights on it, it just looks kinda meh. Except for sandwhiches. bread always looks fine AF.
Commercial photographer here, shot for big brands and independents, with some super-fucking-expensive stylists. Never used anything like that, with the exception of coffee brands using whipped face cream instead of edible cream because it lasts much longer on set and they don’t give a fuck. Brands like McDonalds have learned from being sued, and document the whole process, weighing each ingredient so they can prove it’s real. The reason it looks fake as fuck is that they spend ~30 mins assembling one burger with tweezers and pins and hand-selected pieces of salad etc, syringes to pipe the sauce exactly where they want it etc.
Whats wrong honey? You’ve barely touched your needle skillet.
It’s really not hard to do normally. Almost everybody has a smart phone with a reasonably good camera on it. Take a clean table, turn on all the lights, make each dish with a little extra care so it looks nice, and take a picture of it. You don’t even have to pay anybody.
That means making each dish at least once before opening the restaurant to the public and spending money on ingredients without having a customer pay for them. You’d think a restaurant would make each dish at least once in a trial run for family and friends or something anyway before opening, but it seems not. Otherwise, another option is opening with a temporary text-only menu and taking pictures as customers order each dish. Not sure they’re going to get that chance at this point with spider-web hashbrowns in the menu. Who wouldn’t get up an leave after seeing that?
That requires effort though, I want the computer to do it for me! The future is grim.
Hi there. Yeah, I’ll have the glistening yellow blorbs on whiteflats, fried 𝔾𝔼𝕆𝕄𝔼𝕋ℝ𝕐, waves o’ bacon aaaaand a slice of geographic meat. Do you do ōᴹᴹēᴸᴸēᵀᵀē with 🅀🅄🄱🄴🄼🄴🄰🅃? Cool, one of those too.
Sounds great. How do you like your grid twigs prepared?
Non-Euclidean for me, thanks.
Oh hell yeah, fried 𝔾𝔼𝕆𝕄𝔼𝕋ℝ𝕐, my favourite!
Some look like plastic, some look like dogfood, and the second image is wigging out my trypophobia 🤮
Its extremely unpleasant. Why not use pictures of the food they actually have in the building? Even clip art or stock images would have been better.
“But making that food costs money! Getting ChatGPT to spit out a whole image costs me nothing, rather than the $1.30 it costs to whip up a plate of pancakes and an egg.”
I want pancakes! Will someone make me pancakes?
Takeing good looking photos of food takes effort and time. Layouting takes time and effort and knowledhe of how to use (possibly paid) layouting software.
AI likely hands you a result in 5-10 minutes, compared to hours of work for a menu made traditionally.
Bad looking photos with a bad layout would look better than this.
Also, I bet they had an old menu before this and they threw it away.
What do you have against short-order cook M.C. Escher’s waffles?
I’ve seen these AI food menus all over the place here in Vancouver. It sucks.
Tell the owner’s and then leave. They’ll only get the message if they start losing money over it.
What if i’m a bitch who doesn’t like confrontation?
Put it in a three star review
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?
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…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.
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.
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.
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.
If i remember correctly US has higher salmonella infection rates compared to the rest of the developed world
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 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)?
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.
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.
Runny yolks are normal in the US too. This disclaimer exists on pretty much every menu in the US.
It’s a legal disclaimer so they don’t get sued
I noticed that too… that asterisk makes me feel pretty grossed out, and seems like such an ai addition to a menu.
Ok, I’m not a fan of generative content anyway, but sometimes it’s at least saving effort. I’m confused how a restaurant, who presumably makes and serves these meals, couldn’t just take pictures of the meals instead of doing this? Surely that’d be easier, and you’d have an outcome that actually represents your product. This is just insane, and shows a total disregard for what they’re making. I’d love (hate) to see what their refrigerator and kitchen look like if they put so little care into the menu that’s facing the customer.
Definitely not defending them here, but taking appetizing menu quality photos of food is surprisingly tricky.
You need a lot of glue for that. A lot.
And to dovetail on that: while true, it is very easy to take simple photos of food and use the exact same machine that they used to make this monstrosity to improve those photos and make them appetizing and menu quality.
It really depends on where you put the machine, doesnt it?
Sure, but even bad ones would be better than these.
