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.)

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.

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.

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.

Waffles. AI waffles always looked so cursed.

If they generate AI slop, they're supporting the big corporations.

Edit: damn, that's a lot of AI bros trying to make themselves feel better with "nuance" and "lesser evil" arguments down in the comments. I guess if you don't see your money directly go to OpenAI, it helps you sleep at night better. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.

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.

employees justifiably hate their employers

It’s like when I go to ~~vendor halls at conventions and half the vendors~~ any store that's not a mega-department store all the items are repackaged aliexpress/temu items

ftfy

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.

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.

It’s AI poster or no poster at all. You may prefer no poster

I'm also on team 'no poster'.

I'm far more likely to buy fruit from that place with a handwritten sign on a piece of paper than I am from someplace with a shitty AI slop picture of what a robot thinks fruit looks like. If you're going to have pictures of your product, it had better be actual pictures of the product I'm actually buying. I don't want to see some AI idealized picture of it -- I want to see what it actually looks like. And, no, you don't need to hire a local artist for that. You've got product to sell? You've got a phone in your pocket? Take a fucking photo of it. Put that photo on your poster. Done. No money spent on artists.