"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
AI artwork aside, if I went to a restaurant and was presented a QR code that sent me to Instagram or any other similar site, just to see the food options, I would simply just leave and find another place to eat.
That said, seeing the AI artwork I would probably do the same if it’s a new restaurant. One that I would have been to previously will come down to how good the food was last time.
"You don't have a menu so I'm out"
"What do you mean the requirement to view your menu is to create an account for a platform that gobbles up all my personal data to use it against me? Sounds like you should be paying me to eat here"
100%. Exactly what I would be saying
I know a lot of people who know nothing about AI and would consider this a "cute family." It's a nightmare scenario because we could be flooded by those pictures in a few years.
I'm starting to realize how little people know about making art, and how little they think about the art and graphic design they see in the world.
Like even just looking at cereal boxes I think about how artists on the corporate payroll designed the layout and placed all the elements and I wonder if they started from a flat image and projected it onto a box or if they imagined the box first in their imagination and then thought about how it would be viewed from different angles, especially with regard to shelving...
Anyway I happen to know 3 designers, 2 of whom still work for corpo clients. I'm not a fan of their clients usually, but it's made me realize that there are real people making real artistic decisions behind almost everything you see. Well, at least there used to be. There's a bit less of that now thanks to the latest thing.
Tech bros successfully spawn something infinitely worse than Alegria.
I’m starting to realize how little people know about making art, and how little they think about the art and graphic design they see in the world.
I am oblivious to how normal people react to these sort of stuff, or why business owner decided to use slop. Are they so disconnected that they know no one who can do basic design?
It could be that they want "professional" looking art for ~~cheap~~ free and treated the artists so badly for so long and this kind of situation is the result. If normal people don't care that businesses are using slop then they have even fewer reasons to care. It's starting to feel like "the person doing this job don't deserve to get paid" line of thinking. The Rube Goldberg machine of consequences are so long they probably feel this is completely acceptable thing to do.
I want to see how design/illustration field emerge from the ash once all this shit collapsed, if we're still alive.
I've been through a few branding/packaging exercises in corporate life (I'm an accountant, not an artist at all). My experience was that the branding can be artistic, but then marketers get ahold of it and shove the artwork into preconceived notions of optimizing shelf appearance and drawing the customer's eye. So there's genuine artistry in it but it's distorted by corporate pragmatism.
Yeah that sounds familiar to me as a software dev. My field has been almost totally captured and financialized for years now, so that the stuff the enunciates the roaring of the demon engine capital is the only sound you hear at the end of our sprints, or waterfalls before that.
Most of us working in the corporate world only have very limited spaces to express ourselves, let alone express anything subversive.
In a few years? Approximately 1% of the posters I see for local events are not AI generated... We're already flooded
Tbf even knowing about A"I" it can be incredibly hard to tell apart some of the generated slop from things created by real artists. I even have some friends who draw themselves from time to time (so no full-time artists) who fell for some generated crap, we're still unsure if a human went over those cases or if there were simply so many pixelheaps created that one got close enough...
GenAi is trained on actual artwork which is why it resembles actual artwork at a glance. It averages out all the nuance and details that make images and videos artistic.
That is how we get mockery of reality like the dad's long ass right arm in the post image so often.
This looks particularly sloppy, though.
I guess you only gain an eye for that sort of thing once you see enough of it.
When I can't tell I just can't tell, but does this overly smooth not turn off regular people? Like it's so disgustingly uncanny that it would turn me off my fries (and I love fries)
For aesthetic reasons, I deeply dislike the style. It's indeed uncanny, and must be an average of a few other dominant art styles, yet doesn't directly resemble anything else. Even the exact font-face that tends to get used is hard to pin down.
And that's when I realized that I'm thankful that this current crop of models generates slop that looks like this. It has unintentionally hatched a style that is immediately recognizable as AI generated.
Font-face of my God you nailed it. That's it.
But yeah, like you said at least it makes no effort slop recognisable. I can imagine future gen ai image providers randomising the style to throw people off the scent. Essentially to lie more effectively, eroding the signs of quality and care formed over millennia, so that eventually you can't actually tell if any of the art you see is thoughtful or thoughtless.
Sometimes I think about how many people in my school year growing up were complete fucking morons, and remember that they didn't stop existing after graduation.
It's kinda like the new Corporate Memphis
I'd complain to the manager and walk out fr
I'd crap on the floor, become homeless, and live in their dumpster fr
you enjoy
I don't get it, isn't that already a piece of paper? You can have a QR code there, just print your menu on it...
Tracking data.
It also makes it easier for ~~fools~~ "influencers" to make a quick post about where they are, thus giving the place free advertisement.
If I ever walk into a restaurant and the menu is a QR code, I'm going somewhere else.
But this isn't the community for this.
I considered it but I wasn't alone
I'm willing to forgive restaurants that have often changing menu options, but still, a template and 5 minutes at a kinkos per month isn't expensive or labor intensive either.
Or an electronic display menu that can be changed with a phone or computer.
Or a blackboard or whiteboard where they write the specials.
why do they have only a few selected styles? weren't they trained on basically every style ever?
I believe, at some point (early last year, if my brain isn't doing a funny), the industry generally configured their models to use this glossy cartoon style, if the user doesn't specify anything else, because it's a style the models can do fairly well.
Their largest training set is humans, but mistakes on humans look horrid, due to Uncanny Valley, so the cartoon style avoids that. It also requires relatively few details that the model can get wrong or that the user would have to correct in their prompt (like perspective, light angle etc.).
Well, and this specific cartoon style allows them to still keep lots of detailing where mistakes don't matter, like on the hair, so that it doesn't look entirely simplistic...
It feels like youtube thumbnails. You can do whatever, but people only click on your video when you do the face.
If your menu is only available on social media horseshit, I'm walking out.
Instragram is a no-go for me. Websites have never been cheaper to build and as a business, you can afford it. If you really want to pinch pennies, use something that everyone can get to like a google doc or .pdf somewhere.
That said, having waited tables before, not having a print menu is a massive hygiene win. The wait staff are supposed to wipe those down after their shift, but I guarantee that's not always happening.
Right, rather than use Etsy to host her art, my wife made her own website to sell her jewelry. People are more impressed when you put effort i to something and this AI crap isn't effort. The b8ggest crime is the instagram menu. At that point I would say I don't have a cell phone, I'd prefer a physical menu. If they don't have that, it tells me they are not putting enough effort into the business and may have cut corners elsewhere.
The sexism in those thought bubbles is horrid.
I'd certainly lean into my old man status and demand a paper menu. They must have them. Phone batteries die, people don't bring their phones, etc. Or, do they really turn away customers who don't have access to the stupid online menu?
I don't use instagram either, and I certainly would not install an app just to look at a damn menu. I'd already be expecting to pay through the nose for middling quality food. I'm not going to jump through hoops to order it.
(Add this to the list of reasons I don't actually eat out anymore.)
I can't even use Instagram or any other Zuckerbot crap, because it's services don't even exist for me in the web, because completely blocked with Portmaster.
⇩
I don’t overly mind ordering from a QR code, if the site it leads to was programmed well. In my limited experience, most of the restaurants I’ve visited with QR code menus have had absolutely amazing food. Pointing to Instagram is too much.
But if I see AI art anywhere in the restaurant, I’m out.
They're both looking past eachother. Ai art sucks so much ass.
The AI image on the menu would've been my immediate cue to leave.
QR codes and Instagram aren't really AI. Where does AI enter the picture?
forgot to put pic
Ah, yes. The photo makes a huge difference.
Can’t have a real menu printed, gotta save room for the slop!
Yeah I just went to a restaurant and only QR, no physical menu. Crazy, I hate it.
