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.
There are multiple widely replicated common crappy menu styles already. If anything AI generated menus are likely to lift the quality floor.
I recall in particular when I first moved to London and realised you could identify low quality Italian restaurants by whether they had the same laminated plastic dessert menu from some distributor of ready made desserts... The step up was when they'd cut and pasted parts of that menu design into their own template...
And keep in mind we notice the bad examples, because they stand out. They'll fade out of public consciousness as people get better at getting better output out of them, but they're not likely to disappear - menus have clearly been a low priority for a certain subset of places pretty much forever.
I think there is a big difference between using AI generated food pictures, vs. taking real pictures of your food and using AI to create a menu/poster.
The former is both weird, creepy most of the time, and false advertising. The latter is as you say - the state of the current status quo. I can tell that it's AI, but honestly it's just replacing low-effort human crud for low-effort AI crud. Doesn't bother me at all, it's actually a great use for the technology imo.
As long as it's visibly AI, I don't think it's meaningfully false advertising. The bigger problem with respect to false advertising will be when even the low-effort AI crud is plausible enough that people don't recognise it.
What about the pictures of Chinese food above the counter vs. the actual food you get? There has ALWAYS been a big difference between advertisements and menus and what the food really looks like.
Funnily enough, I was thinking of exactly those photos when writing my comment. I never found them to be all that misrepresentative - that they took a photo from their family friend of their father taken 20 years ago for the same dish they are making me and have it on some faded menu board behind the counter is... honestly pretty close.
It's the fake AI generated "shine" I guess that is the difference to me. Obviously totally made up, not real food, and made to look pretty.
It's mostly the uncanny valley. Both are indeed false advertising, but the AI generated ones are so obviously made up and not real it's a little off putting to me.
Wouldn't really stop me from ordering if I were already there, but it might make me order from their competitor if I were on Uber Eats or whatnot.
I imagine that some?/many? customers of a locally-owned coffee shop are choosing it precisely because it's not a soulless megacorp. They're choosing a different vibe on purpose. Ugly AI advertising is the opposite of that vibe.
The food is in the uncanny valley because no human was involved in assembling the output.
We've got millions of years of evolutionary wiring in our heads to try and figure out if something can be eaten - take that out of the process and you can screw up in a bunch of ways which raise alarm bells.
>>I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction.
Im in India, ordered a bed from a carpenter, a week later he made a great a bed. He took pictures, and used some AI magic had it put it in more grand rooms. He posted it on his Instagram and Facebook feeds.
The next day when I went to him to have it delivered to my place, he showed me he had received lots of offers to make the same bed for other people and his order book was full for the next few months.
Until the robots actually arrive to do his work, AI in many way is going to a huge positive for him. Its going to be the same case for many many such people.
> How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?
If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture. That said, this is really only a problem for the store in respect of returns. If nobody is returning the product because it didn't look as advertised, there probably isn't any harm being done.
I'd expect the picture to be an idealized, perfected version of the food. That's how marketing works. But somewhere in there should be the actual food even if it's cold, sprayed with glycerin, and under studio lighting.
An AI image isn't anything to do with the actual dish. That's too far removed from the reality to be considered fair.
The point is that it was the same business making the image and the actual food. Now basically every business will have the same abomination of a cheeseburger on their menu because they all prompted the same thing, and as a result customers lose that signal.
So defensively we have to assume the worst, but when we actually do that (or god forbid talk to other people about it) online weirdos like yourself start jumping in front of the bullet.
It was hardly ever the same business making the image and the food.
I'll say that again - when a restaurant has pictures of food, those pictures are often from stock, not actual representative shots of the food the restaurant sells.
This especially applies to fast food and tourist eateries. (Upmarket restaurants don't usually have photos at all.)
Just Eat in the UK has a policy of requiring actual dish shots, but that's not the norm.
Hmm. This is not a common occurrence for me (in the US), has happened maybe once in my life that I can remember. I would have exactly the same issue with that, maybe worse since with AI slop I can at least tell before I've spent the money.
I once ordered from a Waffle House once exactly like this:
"I'll have the Texas Bacon Cheesesteak Omelette, with hashbrowns all the way...and I want it to look like the picture."
And to my disbelief, they don't throw a chair at my head.
Instead, the cook came over and asked about that -- usually, they'd finish cooking the omelette filling with the eggs because it tasted better that way, and he wanted to make sure that I wanted the fillings wrapped up as in the photo (kind of like a burrito) instead.
I saw him holding the menu with one hand to use as a reference when plating it. He presented it with a big smile. And, indeed, it did look exactly like the photo in the menu.
Yes? My main experience with menus with pictures is Chinese restaurants where they took a poorly staged and lit photo of the actual dish. Sometimes the real thing ends up looking better than the picture.
Er, all the time? In the South East of England, I specifically look for menus with pictures of the food on Just Eats because I can get an idea of how good the food is going to be that way. I don't think I've ever received something that didn't look like what was on the menu pictures. Sometimes people make a nice presentation with fancy dishware and so on (Indian restaurants do that a lot in particular), but the food is always the same as what I get when I order, except it's in a foam box or similar.
This isn't black and white, it's a sliding scale. Advertising, menu boards, box art, etc. do show the product in the best light possible and take artistic liberties, but are substantially closer to the real product than an AI that's never seen the product spitting out an image of a burger.
It's reasonable to be annoyed when the menu board _isn't based on the product at all_ and thus is nowhere close to the real thing.
If I got served food at a restaurant and realized that the pictures were from a different restaurant, I would be pissed off in exactly the same way and amount as if a menu used AI slop. The only difference is that with AI slop you can tell ahead of time and decide not to spend money there.
I don't eat cereal and I can't think of the last time I ate at a restaurant that had pictures on the menu, but to your point I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist.
> I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist
Neither the images created by ChatGPT nor an artists rendition of a latte exist, but based on this logic you’d have a problem with both?
I think most people are just reacting to the careless default style of ChatGPT, or the fact that a human didn’t draw it, not the fact that it’s not “real”.
I agree that it wasn’t a strong response, but 1) we can still be nice and 2) if you read the rest of their comment they do have substantive things to say.
I think it’s relevant in that they lack the personal experience, and so can’t comment on the given points from experience, as they might be expected to.
It's not that it's fake. It's that it has a distinct style.
I once thought that AI image/video would quickly become unidentifiable, but the surprising thing (so far) is that every new model release is followed by two reactions: "This is incredible" to "I recognize this style. It's AI. They're all the same."
It takes only a few weeks. I've been amazed with our mind's ability to move the goalpost.
In the U.S., at least, this is not really true. The FTC has laws that prohibits companies from using non-food products (e.g., glue for milk or motor oil for syrup) in photographs of food they’re selling. They also have laws about deceptive marketing practices. These laws definitely aren’t perfectly enforced, but it’s hardly the widespread problem you’re suggesting it is. Also pretty funny to specifically highlight Chinese food, which has always looked like someone used a disposable camera to hastily snap a photo of a real plate of food about to be given to a customer sometime in 1997 in ~90% of the Chinese restaurants I’ve ever been to.
AI obviously has 0 realness to it. So it’s worse in every way.
In this cases isn’t it that they can use the glue for milk though because they aren’t selling the milk, it’s the cereal (enlarged for texture) that they are selling.
Indeed you are correct about this! What I think is different in these cases is that the images of the food in your examples (generally) aim to make it look good, whereas the AI art makes it looks like slop (literally and figuratively).
I also prefer the side case of actual photos of the food, which is common at delis and some more authentic Chinese restaurants; these are also being replaced quickly by AI.
Has AI art made my food less delicious - I don't think I've ever purchased food I've seen first represented by AI, but certainly the expectation of taste affects your perception of it...
Ah, you've been downvoted by the holier than thou "nyeeeh!" crowd.
You are correct though, especially fast food places using air brushed and photoshopped food photos are the inedible food object has been carefully set up.
And no amount of petty votes will change the above.
> 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.
> Guy: Unfortunately if you won't change it I will be sharing it with the community
> Guy: I've love to support you in getting it remade ethically for cheap but if you're not willing to I'm going to let other artists know
> Guy: I understand you didn't know at the time, that's ok. That's why I'm trying to help
> Guy: I'll give you a day to think about it and I'll get you some names and prices of people who could either make a new poster or write up the board for you
> Owner: I have been attacked enough because of this. Disrespected and defeated how people bombarded me with mean comments and DMs. Many have unfollowed me. Go ahead and share if that's what makes you happy.
That's "the threat" the article is referring to. Incredibly bad framing, if you hadn't read the conversation you'd think the guy would have threatened to send armed goons, instead he's telling her he'll give the coffee shop bad press in a local image board.
Not saying I approve, but it's nowhere near as bad as the people who went off on the title alone think it is.
That's actually really bad. The guy is threatening the poor store owner, complete with stupid movie cliches like claiming he's just helping when in fact the intent is absolutely not to help but to bully, threaten and in general wreck the guys business if he doesn't go along with this set of Mafia codes.
Also, you have to consider the context here. The sort of people who make these threats are invariably very left wing, and they have a long history of using violence against anyone they view to be doing harm to their protected classes. Whoever gets this sort of threat will be wondering if some Antifa type is going to throw a rock through their window.
> The sort of people who make these threats are invariably very left wing, and they have a long history of using violence against anyone they view to be doing harm to their protected classes.
The overwhelming majority of political violence in this country comes from the right [0].
You're blinded by ideology, and trying to push a narrative that includes the mafia and antifa. A narrative that doesn't fit the events described in TFA. There is no credible threat of violence, at most the guy will use his platform to bad-mouth her buisness. Antifa doesn't throw bricks at coffee shops because they used AI.
My local coffee shop not only doesn’t have social media, but they don’t even bother decorating the store. Truly unique and amazing coffee, absolutely no design inside. It’s amazing and it really turns people off!
It’s more about the way it was phrased and presented. Just sharing publicly available facts with your community (or anyone really) is not a problem in itself, but the message does rub me the wrong way.
The message’s author is trying to present themselves as someone helpful and compassionate (‘I understand’, ‘I’m trying to help’), but at the same time, they’re one-sidedly setting a firm and short deadline (‘I’ll give you a day’) unprompted and suggesting the café owner strike a deal with one of the people they’re going to recommend. They might have written this with good intentions at heart, but it also wouldn’t feel out of place in a mafia setting (as in ‘do business with us, or else’), so it’s a hard sell.
If they really were compassionate and wanted to help, they easily could have suggested to get the owner in touch with some affordable artists and left her with time to mentally deal with the backlash and all. They didn’t need to emphasise how they were going to tell on her like they were about to launch a vendetta smear campaign or something.
There are no good intentions here. This is the mafia playbook through and through - "It would be a pity if something were to happen to your <insert valuable property or reputation here>".
Well, the basic idea of it is not so bad. A business generally wants to keep their customers happy and care for their reputation, so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal.
The important thing is how we go about it, and whether their reputation remains reflective of their actions, or we try and make it worse than it ought to be. We can’t say for certain the author of the message was going to do the latter, but it does not inspire good faith.
I wrote my comment with the assumption that the ‘basic idea’ was intentionally making reputation worse on account of poor behaviour, and communicating that to the business owner. Of course, if you imagine the basic idea to be the extortive aspect, then it is literally extortion.
> "A business generally wants to keep their customers happy and care for their reputation, so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal."
Yes, except this case isn't about a customer—it's a disgruntled vendor (commercial artist) acting on behalf of an association of other vendors. Not (AFAICT) on behalf of real customers.
A customer complaining about their needs and preferences is useful feedback.
A vendor whom you have no business relationship with (and want none) is not helpful.
If they criticize your business practices in public, that's certainly their right. But, if they're threatening to do that, with an attached demand of commercial services to them (or to their associates), that's something else. It's the linked demand for payment that loses them all legitimacy. (Possibly even into criminal racketeering; I'm not an expert).
Certainly, but considerate the alternative: the account simply publicly posts about a public posting (not private business). Which happens all of the time for public ridicule or shame. At least this provides some recourse for the person affected. Sure, the alternative is simply to not post in the first place; but such is the nature of large social media accounts.
I don’t deny that based on the screenshot there is both strong-arming and a lack of sympathy or empathy from the other account towards the fact that it seems like many people are just using AI tools without giving it a second thought.
However, I’m just pointing out that as far as the implications of the threat goes, in most instances it would’ve just happened anyway, without a “warning”, because people simply post things to make fun of them and mock them. Sometimes those accounts might at least anonymize their subjects, but this might be a name them and shame them type situation.
It's an implied threat, which you can infer from the presentation of the information. For example:
You really should listen to me. If you need some time to think it over, I understand. It's a lot to consider and you've got a lot in your plate. I'll check in soon - would tomorrow be okay? If you need more time, just tell me when.
vs
You really should listen to me. I'll give you a day to think it over before I take further action.
Same information, but the latter assumes a position of authority (I, the person in charge, will be the provider of the time you will receive), and then uses that position to provide an ostensible benevolence as a way to mitigate the implied follow up of non-benevolence. The threat is introduced as the power disparity. The person in power has leverage over the less powerful and the threat is that they will use it. Remove the power disparity, and the implication of threat is also removed.
Unions also use the threat of striking as a leverage point against corporations. As I noted elsewhere in this thread, there seems to be a common fallacy in this thread of "threat = bad". Laws are threats too. You need a more convincing argument than this.
My comment is about how inference and implication can change the result of a message just as much as the content or context. Whatever axe you've got to grind about threats being bad has nothing to do with what I said. Laws are threats. Unions make threats. So what? My point stands. Things that are obviously threats are threats, and things that say the same things in different ways might not be threats.
Laws are threats. The difference is that we empower the government to threaten us to maintain social order, we do not empower individuals to threaten each other.
Sharing it with the community could have negative impact on her business. So they were threatening her business success by sharing the info in a certain form with the community.
This. Based on the headline I was expecting a physical threat on the owner, instead we get a screenshot of them treating it as a learning opportunity and the owner responding in an incredibly condescending way.
It literally is not. You can maybe phrase it to sort of sound like a threat but “I’m going to share your public ad” is never a threat. It’s like if you angrily yell “I’m going to come to a complete stop at this upcoming stop sign!” in a threatening voice and then do that, it wasn’t a threat. Great. That’s what the sign is for. That’s what everyone wants you to do.
In the context of how it was done, saying that they would give them a list of people and a day to think it over, it really is a threat, it's a kind of extortion.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what extortion is. It's only extortion if the one extorting is the one receiving the benefit. Hiring a random artist on Fiverr would still make them happy (since the poster is not AI) but would not benefit them in any way.
That's not what the "threat" said. It said that they would give them a list of people, it isn't obvious that hiring some random would have made them happy. It's not even obvious whether this wasn't just a convenient way to make some money for a friend.
I understand if you don't like how the person phrased it, but the goal of the DM was obviously to get the store owner to replace the AI poster. Assuming that they would have gone on a crusade because they didn't pick a "preferred artist" is pure unsupported speculation on your part.
It is worth pointing out that the article doesn’t even imply that the business suffered any negative outcome here (ie damage or loss of sales etc.) It also doesn’t implied that the person threatened that the business might suffer any negative outcome, just that they would talk about the ad that the business made and put out for people to see and share.
This article is very careful not to actually elaborate on what the “threat” might’ve meant because I’d imagine that baselessly speculating out loud about what they imagine it could be would open them up to getting sued.
It’s all just uwu smol bean coffee shop chiropractor bullied by mean anti-ai mob dreck
Saying you’ll do something that’ll harm someone (or, more precisely in this instance, their business) can reasonably be called a threat (in the broad sense of the word), though not necessarily the unfair kind of threat most people imagine when they say ‘threat’.
You can threaten someone with ceasing to be a customer if they don’t change their business practices, and that’s perfectly fine. Sharing publicly available information is generally not a problem, either. But in this case, the author of the message is coming off as very insincere, setting deadlines, and trying to strike up deals, which comes off as unreasonable and makes one wonder if they really are simply going to share publicly available information, or if they’re going to give undue focus over them being ‘uncooperative’. If they did not want their message to come off as a threat, this was very far from an ideal way to write it.
Hey now, these folks are -really enjoying- their highly contrived version of the events. How dare you limit their enjoyment by recontextualizing this into what most of my non-highly-online friends would view as the "normal" understanding.
As a person who went through and eventuall rejected the culture-jamming adbusters thoughts in the early 2000s, it's really hard for me to view a threat to share an ad as anything other than a "threat" to increase the "organic reach of the ad" or whatever "metric" that folks here would use.
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.
Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it. I'd feel differently if some big corporate chain were doing this, but if it's a little "mom & pop"/"hole in the wall" type place, cheap advertising is a neutral-to-positive signal.
> Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it.
Why? When you see a derelict pizzeria, you don't think "they must be devoting all their energy to making good pizzas!". Similarly, that a coffee shop owner uses AI for branding is a big signifier of their laziness or lack of attention to detail.
If I'm lining up to order from a shabby old school bus with a menu in the window written in sharpie on a piece of cardboard, I know I'm a couple minutes away from tucking into some banging tacos.
Starbucks has an amazingly polished corporate image and at least where I'm from the locales have great wall art done by local artists presented alongside tasteful decor and a minimalistic but well cared for choice of furniture that I can't honestly give it no less than a 9/10 presentation.
The coffee still tastes like a Victorian chimney sweeper's piss.
I’m not GP but this hits for me so I’ll reply in good faith
I don’t actually care about the menu or sign. It’s a coffee drink and I’ve had thousands if not hundreds of thousands of them. I know what I like and if it’s just stencil letters pinned on a cork board I don’t care. I just want to grab a coffee and go.
A shop with no pictures, just words? Sends a message that their coffee is probably good enough to speak for itself. Fine.
A shop with hand drawn lettering, ornate art? The coffee is probably made by people who care about their craft in some fashion. At least the person making my coffee probably enjoys their job a little. Fine.
Fully AI menu with gen Ai modeled drink pictures? The drink isn’t going to look like that. There is obviously no effort made here. They spent time to create a generic menu my kids could have put together. Worst of the lot, to be honest.
It was just a replacement for those temporary chalkboard menus, the person wo did that previously left. Perhaps she has bad taste but that doesn't mean she was slacking off. Did they spend a lot of time on the chalkboard menus previously?
This is what people are actually mad about when businesses use AI art. You claim to live in an artistic community, great, ask your staff if they have any friends who draw who want to come by and make a quick $100. You spent more money on a worse result that alienates your community.
My coffee shop barely has a menu. None of the current roasts are listed anywhere, you have to ask and they change daily. No signage. It’s consistently the best coffee I’ve had. Not fussy but very very good.
They do slack off on cleaning the chairs and the decor, that’s for sure. The coffee though is phenomenal.
How would a coffee shop spend an hour making their coffee better
Like you own a coffee shop and you’ve freed up one hour in the 12 weeks before you have to make a new sign, what do you do in that hour that makes the coffee better?
Absolutely not. My local kebab shop 100% uses AI for their menus and signage. It’s delicious. He does not have time or the desire to worry about the provenance of the menus.
It’s a pretty good indicator the owner bought a ChatGPT or Canva subscription, that’s about it.
The article literally mentions that they have baristas, one of whom was making the old menu because they were "aesthetically inclined." This can also be confirmed by looking at the employment section of their website.
The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.
Every single small coffee shop owner I know has employees. They work alongside them and do every job in the shop along with them. They operate in shifts, sometimes the owner is there for both open and close.
What does hiring a barista have to do with not making coffee yourself?
Gonna go with the "hilariously out of touch" comment. These places rarely print money to the point an owner can be an absentee manager type.
You're pretending not to comprehend the simple concept of a barista.
I can see you're not interested in a good faith conversation here. I'm not going to waste any more of my time. Feel free to keep on berating me if it makes you feel better.
The most fitting description of an owner of a small coffee shop is "barista". Most barista's I know also handle far more than just making coffee and serving customers. They do everything short of being personally financially responsible for the business itself.
It's quite clear that if anyone was operating in bad faith here, it's not the commenters challenging your position. Small business ownership is almost always simply a riskier version of having the job you're also hiring for with a very small chance of upside. Usually at lower pay.
In this particular case the owner was simply doing a task other barista's like herself were doing as part of the regular job of a barista.
> The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.
This is the part I do not follow. Of course she is? What small coffee shop owner do you know does not personally make or serve the coffee on a regular basis? The only way not to take your original post in bad faith is to not understand your meaning.
the only "threat" mentioned in the article is that someone said that if she didn't take the sign down they would post about it in a local artist community. Threatening people with violence is always unwarranted, but trying to portray talking with other people about what someone is doing as a "threat" is disingenuous.
I think that issuing an ultimatum where if the person does not do what you want, that you will be sharing your concerns with likeminded people online, with the underlying implication being that the business owner will end up experiencing some kind of negative outcome from that, is absolutely a threat.
Exactly. Pure cancel culture. Just be humble to understand the world might not agree with your views and let it be. Less "this can't exist" and more of "this is not for me".
It's not cancel culture to bad-mouth a business and refuse them your patronage.
People are vocal about what they feel passionate about, and a world where they weren't or couldn't sounds hellish to me. How would society ever progress? We'd still have "whites only" restaurants in that world.
Not saying that justifies all anger targeted at business owners, but a blanket "criticism bad" stance is a bit silly. You have to make an actual argument as to why you think the anti-AI crowd is misguided in this case.
Cancel culture or not, people are allowed to tell other people they know that something is happening, and those people can decide for themselves to patronize the business or not. To call it a threat is really exaggerating.
The headline makes it sound like people are phoning in bomb threats and violence, which doesn't seem to be happening at all.
Honestly, I think the business owner should have ignored these weak "threats" altogether. It doesn't have anything to do with coffee and it's unlikely they'll get any business because they use AI, so it can only hurt them.
I get you think the word is too heavy but remember: it's a small business and bad press is a serious thing. It could be enough to shut down the place. Just see how afraid local shop owners are of Yelp. You get review bombed there and you have a serious problem. You don't know if these artists won't just unload their (just) frustration at AI on the business exactly like that. By judging the tone "change or I'll tell the artists", it's very likely the person would try to incite them instead of just "telling" them.
Okay, but I (and I suspect a lot of people) really don't care if somebody is threatened in that way. If the business person doesn't want other people to know what they're doing then maybe they shouldn't do it. It's not worthy of a news article, IMO.
If somebody threatens them with violence (which is what "threat" is usually implying) then that's a different thing entirely.
If I tell someone that I am going to take a coordinated effort to undermine their business and get customers to stop shopping there, potentially resulting in the demise of the business, the loss of their livelihood and ability to provide for themselves or their family, I cannot think of any reasonable person who would not categorize that as a threat. A threat by no means is limited to violence only.
I am really disturbed by language minimizes concrete actions taken to cause harm.
"I am not hurting your business I am just talking to my friends!"
Sorry, but the business owner has to own their actions. If they have a large customer base of artists who will feel betrayed by their using AI, then it was a mistake to use it.
It's her right to use AI, but the customers also have the right to say they won't patronize businesses who use AI, and are free to tell people they know that the business is using it.
If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
If the "business owner needs to own their actions", shouldn't the people who are seeking to take a coordinated effort to harm that business also "own their actions" and be able to say plainly what they are doing instead of misrepresenting it via "Stop being crazy, I'm not making threats, I'm just talking to my friends" gaslighting nonsense?
> If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
To entertain this analogy, if a shop is misrepresenting their ingredients then it can make sense to spread the word, particularly if the shop owner refuses to rectify the issue, because there are health implications which represent a legitimate material harm to their customer base and the safety issue takes priority over the shop owner's bottom line.
An AI menu, assuming it offers a reasonable representation of what the shop offers, has no safety issue.
AI stealing their jobs isn't a "legitimate material harm"?
It doesn't matter anyway, because "using AI" doesn't make somebody a protected class. If people don't want to patronize businesses that use AI, there's nothing wrong with that.
> AI stealing their jobs isn't a "legitimate material harm"?
No, if you have to make several indirect causal leaps, to get from "shop owner uses ChatGPT instead of MS Word to generate a menu" to "somewhere a graphic designer loses their employment" it is not legitimate. And if that is how you interpret the world, virtually any harmful or even violent action can be rationalized in the name of stopping some probabilistic harm.
Sticking with your cow's milk analogy, serving the wrong milk to the wrong customer with a dairy allergy can cause immediate harm to their health. Generating an AI menu cannot be reasonably interpreted as causing direct harm to anyone.
> If people don't want to patronize businesses that use AI, there's nothing wrong with that.
I completely agree. But making a personal choice to not visit a business and undertaking a coordinated effort to organize a boycott against a business is in a different category altogether.
Did you not read the article? She was unaware of the controversy and had just had a baby - which tends to be quite a stressful and time consuming thing.
The milk comparison is specious and irrelevant, because consumers are there for the product. Coffee shops sell coffee, not jpegs.
But aside from that - bullying and threatening a working mother with a newborn is not the moral high ground you seem to believe it is.
She's not a witch, and your assumed right to burn her is not a good look.
"It would be a pity if I were to tarnish jlarocco's reputation within my network. I even have his GitHub from his profile. I'll just talk shit about him to all the CTOs on the block and ensure he doesn't get a job again..."
See how that works? That's why you should care. The so-called influencer-orienter culture has become a plague after social media. And these F&B businesses are the ones hit hardest - remember all those movies in the 90s and 00s about how some up and coming entrepreneur or chef had to win the approval of some hoity-toity food journalist?
Also, rest assured, I'm not serious about badmouthing you or anyone here for that matter - just trying to illustrate a point.
In that analogy, you SHOULD assume the person is an influencer.
In the case of this shop, we're talking about local retail. If you are a retail small business owner you have to assume that any customer can be an "influencer" and cause significant harm if they seek to trash your business online.
As a rule, small business owners (as well as HN's population of temporarily embarrassed tech workers) treats being asked to not take as much profit as possible like being stabbed with a knife
Nobody threatened the business owner. Somebody offered the business a chance to change up the ad (and help doing so) before it got shared, and the owner figured it would be better to go viral with the slop ad. Now there’s an article in Business Insider painting the business as the victim of mean customers that assaulted it by not liking the slop poster, so it looks like it all worked out for them.
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.
im like you, simply out of apathy. but i immediately thought, "if were the coffee shop owner, would i rather experience a silent decline in business or face public outrage but have an opportunity for redemption?"
ive been called enough mean names by friends and strangers id much rather be called some more mean names in order to become aware of what i could do to win back some customers
I would once again like to point out that the "threat" mentioned in the article is someone saying they'll talk about what the shop owner did with their friends.
It's informing people that there is something a business is doing that they might not approve of and they might want to change their behaviour accordingly.
From a more... pessimistic/optomistic point of view (I'm really not sure which applies here, it depends how you look at it) It is also about a culture with absolutely no safety net, where AI and increased automation moving into someones field (in this case, graphic design work) isn't just "oh, less people will need my services" and more "My income will completely disappear and I will be broke/homeless faster than I can possibly learn something else fast enough to compete with the omnipotent AI".
The way to make these transitions less aggressive on everyone is to not have it tied directly to whether or not someone can afford to eat.
I think that’s letting people off the hook too easily. This sort of mob behaviour is simply normal. Normal means something that happens often, not something we find admirable. With a safety net it would be the same sort of thing - people decide that x is bad and dogpile it to get their dopamine. Some people really like the dogpiling, others like it less, but it calls to an ugly part of our psychology.
I agree that people like the dogpile, but those dog-piles are normally starts by someone who feels like they are personally victimized and threatened by whatever action they are objecting to.
People take things very personally when their core livelihood and ability to support themselves are threatened.
I dislike AI because it represents the state's power to automatically surveil mass populations and automate everything from labor it's use of force in warfare.
Please, do go on about how the folks who find the aesthetic around that repugnant in a way that hand-drawn-chalkboards are the "real threat".
Except that corporations are not people (well, except one place). A power imbalance between corporations and humans is enough to justify a lot of non-violent behavior which may be considered non-ethical to fellow people, but totally fine towards a corpo. Boycott is one of such traditional ways.
Btw. notice how boycott is often perceived as ok to good, while "cancel culture" as bad, while both are identical if the target is corporation.
Imo, artists boycotting any corporation for any reason at all, even if the Ouija board told them so, are completely justified.
I think you’re right actually. It has always been a thing, but I think maybe we were better at suppressing it in the past. It seems like this sort of open, grassroots warfare is new.
I don’t think it’s the artists who are doing things like this. It’s usually people who aren’t directly impacted and are “working” on other people’s behalf who do this sort of thing. I suspect it’s power-seeking personalities using a socially acceptable excuse to exercise power over someone else.
No it's about people thinking that I should care about their business when they clearly do not. When you use AI in these lazy ways it's clear that you just don't care.
That doesn’t even make sense. If you’re a customer before she puts up the sign it hasn’t magically made the coffee or the service worse. You want to force her to act the way you want, it’s that simple.
Dude, small business owners only have so much to spend on marketing. Before it was AI, it was stock images or Microsoft clip art. I don't care that my plumber has bad logo, it saving money on a logo keeps him from selling to PE and enshittifying his business.
> 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.
I agree to a degree - it feels manipulative on the part of the writer, trying to exaggerate any sympathy a reader might feel.
That said, I also feel that the level of negativity the lady suffered was a little out of proportion to her 'crime' - essentially amounting to bullying.
I prefer to see the real actual food i am about to buy on menus. I hate when i get it and it looks nothing like the menu photo. But companies like mc donalds have been deceiving people for decades with help of pro photographers and designers. In this case the sign is pretty and it is clear the items are just drawings. I think it is cool for small biz owners to be able to help themselves with AI. It would probably be better if she used real actual pics of her products with a phone and asked AI to put those inbthe sign in the same stylized way.
I feel quite bad for her. If you aren’t in the know (chronically online), I don’t think it’s obvious whatsoever that using AI for a poster could be seen as unethical. I doubt she even expected anyone to point it out.
At the same time though, even if time or budget is tight enough that you’d want to use AI, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t still use real photos for the menu items. This style that the AI apparently defaults to is kinda somewhat passable-ish, until you get to the food items which often look like they would inflict you with several status effects.
I don't think it has to be about ethics at all. People might just be turned off by digital illustrations of food that could pass as creatures from a Ridley Scott film. I'm also a little surprised that this remains the aesthetic that AI continues to go with. With the top end being AI actresses giving major news outlet interviews, have basic free tier models not advanced beyond cosmic horror food?
It’s interesting you know, back when music piracy was first a thing online, there was a popular idea, even backed by some research I think, that music piracy didn’t impact sales because people wouldn’t have had the money to buy that music otherwise.
The theory was that piracy might actually increase sales due to more exposure of the music to consumers.
AI generated art, AI generated anything really, is very close to piracy, but nobody is making that argument anymore.
I think this is because the positions are reversed - the general public were motivated to find and spread vacuous reasons that piracy was neutral to good as it benefited them. When the general public might be harmed, instead of corporate rights-holders, then it becomes an unambiguous moral wrong.
So it’s never really been about right and wrong, it’s just about who benefits. Like everything I guess.
Why should corporations be given rights equal to humans? I see no problem to okaying one activity for individuals but banning it from businesses and corporations.
No one actually has to care about the well-being of corporations. There are no corporations in the Bible.
Decades ago when corporations were taking over the world, they used to justify it as a proxy for eventual benefits to the standard of living of regular people. I guess now we don't even bother.
Doesn't the bible treat collective institutions as moral actors all the time? And why are you using the bible as your grounding, not every one shares Christian morality
This ticked me off. People need to lay tf off the AI use bashing. If someone doesn't want to support a business or whatever because of X, then quietly take yourself and your negativity elsewhere. Don't make yourself a nuisance because people's choices don't line up with your bias.
5 minutes? I'll have spent more time writing this comment and posting the image to imgur than I did having the bot produce that image in the first place.
It's not grand at all; just an informative sign about some fall specials that is direct and to the point. (Nothing about it was done by hand, but nothing about it would get people all torches-and-pitchforks, either.)
Exactly. What we are really talking about is people lacking taste. People don’t want to see shit graphic design. At the state fair this year, all the food places and rides were covered an obvious low quality ai image work. The difference between acceptable and gross can be as simple as a prompt tweak.
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.
I have no problem with coffee shops intentionally using AI, that said...
It's also worth keeping in mind that a shop owner might google "clip art cup of coffee" and the result was created by somebody who used AI, and the shop owner wouldn't necessarily realize it. At some point, 99% of clip art available online is going to be AI.
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.
I mean there's a pretty big third group there which recognizes the good parts and the bad parts. Right?
For every person who can spot it a mile away I wonder how many false positives they have or simply aren't aware of it. If you're looking for it, with people using it a lot these days, of course you are going to have a high success rate.
But really I don't think it falls neatly into either of those categories.
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.
Edit: even in this comment section there are a lot of people who are bitter about this (which showed up since I started typing this). Goes to show how important it is.
Personally I will not fault any individual for following a norm that they do not have the perspective to reject. So I think the coffee shop owner and the critics both screwed up here, by participating in shame-culture on both sides. However they did not know they could do differently---nobody has demonstrated to them the harm and degradation of their actions, nor what the alternative is. But as analytical outsiders we can make that observation and put it to use later by not practicing that behavior ourselves, and by helping others learn to not practice it either.
first ill address your point and anecdotally i think this is sort of how "normal" people apologize now. i find it gross, personally, but its so ubiquitous ive learned to tune it out
why i actually replied: would have been an excellent punch line if the apology post was clearly ai gen chock full of clauddish. not sure if id come back around to respecting the owner, but id laugh for sure
I think it is how people apologize normally because it's a norm, yes, but it's to everyone's detriment. They don't like it, the people receiving it don't care about it, it's not a real apology, it's just a sort of trapped norm that needs to change. That's why I bothered to point it out.
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.
A lot of this stuff again seems like labor augmentation not replacement, like in this article. She wasn't using professional paid artists previously, but a mix of her own extra labor (which she had less time for with a baby) & a barista who drew well (but had recently left). Most small businesses are like this.
I'm not an AI booster, but I think GenZ particularly have really lost their mind with the anti-AI rage.
I was handing out flyers at a fundraiser, for a charity to promote their next event. The flyers were made by a staff member using some AI art.
Some GenZ kid started ranting to me about how the flyers were AI slop and how some artist would have been willing to do the job, blah blah blah.
Kid, its a charity event that I'm volunteering for on a beautiful sunny summer weekend day for.. it's gonna raise like $10k if we are lucky.. no artist was going to paid with or without AI.
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.
> 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?
Or, for that matter - skip the photos, just do text, maybe with a few bits of clip art if you're feeling daring. Photos are hardly essential for coffee drinks, which tend to all look the same in real life anyway.
People are bombarded with crappy genAI graphics and even if they can't articulate what about it they dislike aesthetically, I believe most are able to draw the short line from the bad, piss-filter, fake-ghibli slop they see to the social/environmental ills most associate with AI. I have mixed thoughts on shame as a tool for social cohesion but in my mind it's a positive that use of genAI for artistic purposes seems like it's nearly universally panned and people trying to pass off the output as their own are (rightfully) clowned.
The text exchange in the article with the thinly veiled threat is exactly how you'd expect someone disempowered (and it's not like working artists pre AI times had a ton of capital to begin with) to act when they are given some power. As we continue displacing, or attempting to displace, individuals up the value chain, I think we'll continue to see echoes of this kind of behavior. When the luddites can't break into the factory to smash the machines, smashing the outputs and users of the machine seems like the obvious choice.
The follow up instagram post, so the one after she showed off her awful looking sign:
> I want to address the recent conversation surrounding our fall menu boards.
> The design was created using gen AI. I want to be transparent about that. At the time, I genuinely did not understand the extent of the concerns surrounding AI-generated artwork, particularly the impact it can have on artists and the environmental concerns associated with it.
> My intention was never to disrespect artists, take credit for someone else’s work, or diminish the value of human creativity. I was simply trying to put together our fall menu during an especially busy and demanding time for me and our small team.
> That said, I have listened to the feedback. I understand why people have strong feelings about it, and I respect those concerns. Going forward, I have decided that Penny’s Coffee Shop will not be using AI for our menu artwork and promotional designs.
> What has been difficult for me, however, is the amount of negativity, personal attacks, and messages that followed this situation. There is a real person behind this small business. I am doing my best to run a local coffee shop, support my team, serve our community, and navigate being a new mom at the same time.
> I am always willing to listen, learn, and do better. I just hope we can have those conversations with kindness and respect.
> To everyone who continues to support Penny’s, especially through a challenging time for our business, thank you. Your support means more than you know.
Why does business insider make it seem like she's seething angry about this situation when the actual content of the response instagram post seems very level headed. (Rhetorical question, I know why.)
- I'm sorry
- I know my use of gen AI made it seem like I dislike artists
- That's not a belief of mine
- I'll prove that by not using gen AI at my cafe for this sort of thing ever again
- Please be kind to me, this is a small business and I'm very stressed out
Bam, perfect, hit everything a PR firm would tell you to say to make this go away as quickly as possible...
Talking to business insider was exactly the wrong thing to do after that. Your sign looks bad. You've made the awful mistake of telling more people about your bad sign with the intent of making them feel sympathetic. Even if they feel sympathetic, people still look at the bad sign you made in desperation along with the framing from BI and think... "oh so maybe she shouldn't be running a cafe then. This seems like she's barely getting by at this point".
On the flip side, telling someone "pay my artist friend or else I'll go out of my way to tell people primed to hate you based on a single detail, about only that 1 single detail" is actual old-school extortion.
For $150 or less, I bet they could have hired a fiverr person to come over for two hours and letter the chalkboard.
This reads to me like a YouTube AI thumbnail. If you go to a lot of trouble to make a product and then you punt the last and probably easiest step in the process, makes me not want to engage with the product.
As a society we need to start seriously planning on how to ban AI in art.
- I don’t want to listen music with AI generated vocals or tunes.
- I don’t want to watch TV shows or movies with AI generated scripts.
- I don’t want to read novels with AI generated text
- I don’t want to see animations with any amount of AI in it.
- I don’t want to play video games made by any amount of AI. (No FCKIN Blender models made with AI)
- I don’t want any amount of my digital art or posters to be touched by AI.
I think as a part of alignment all AI models above a certain size should refuse requests to generate stories, scripts any art object etc. text-to-image, text-to-music, text-to-videos should just be banned outright, I don’t see any good use case for them outside of art.
If society cannot agree to do the above then at the very least, we should have a way to easily know if AI was involved in any of the art I interact with, so that I can avoid it with a ten foot pole.
I say this as an early adopter and lover of technology in general, I bought the Vision Pro the day it came out, I bought experimental volumetric displays, experimental robot vacuums, I own 2 robot arms, LED panels etc. but generative AI in art just leaves me with disgust, I want no part of it.
Going from "I don’t personally want to consume AI art" to "the government and every major AI lab should prevent everyone else from making it" is precisely the sort of thing that makes schadenfreude such a useful word. :)
I don’t see why a president can’t write a “No Generative AI in art” executive order, society has banned plenty of other pointless stuff, I would vote for them to ban this.
I think there are plenty of us, outside of tech circles who want it banned too. It is one of the least popular technologies in existence. Unfortunately I don’t think it will be banned anytime soon, but I do hope we eventually ban it.
> "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?
Basic economic theory states that only holds if the goods / services being provided are equivalent in the eyes of consumers. It seems self evident here that consumers do not consider them equivalent.
You said that the AI industry feels they're replaceable. I'm not saying that AI does equivalent work, I'm saying that AI companies don't choose the prices for art, they just play in the market.
> 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'
The issue comes when you (or someone, not you personally) dig way to deep into what "it" is, there is always something that someone was, to quote you, "too lazy to do yourself". You might not like the result, and that's fine, but you're phrasing it as if the other person is just being unnecessary-lazy.
They probably bought their display stands instead of designing and building them themselves. They also probably bought the cheap ones from Amazon (instead of building them themselves, or hiring a local artisanal carpenter to build them).
Do you refuse to engage with a pastry stand because the owner was "too lazy to do it themselves"? If you're at a friends house and they order food, do you refuse to engage with it because "they were too lazy to cook it themselves"? Where do you draw the line?
Your point as it applies to something that takes a sufficient portion of your time is valid, but this conversation is literally about a menu sign at a coffee shop. If you spent substantial time engaging with a coffee shop sign, I have questions (and wouldn't want to be behind you in that line).
I would take those stances if they didn't spend any real time picking out or curating their furnature and goods.
If they spent time more time curating better AI images or asked anybody with modern taste and style what they thought we probably wouldn't be talking about it.
I think you missed the point. I was using the parent commenters "too lazy" language. Small business owners are very often drastically overloaded and any "corners cut" is to get what is needed in place, and not "lazy".
If you think the opposite, and that small business owners have ample time and are just lazy when they don't build everything from scratch, you should teach a course about how to manage a small business.
Someone else told her she can fix it with help of local comunity and if she doesn't fix it, they will publish facts about her AI usage.
Judging by logic of some commenters if journalist ask someone questions, give them time to reply to give them opportunity to present their views and later publish it without them not meeting the deadline is now considered a threat.
Btw. I am also sick of AI slop everywhere in magazines, ads, etc., so if I can choose with my wallet whether I spend my money in AI slop shop or shop not using AI, it's easy choice.
This is so weird. Small businesses like delis and pizza parlors and Chinese food joints have been using stock photography and pre-made advertisements for decades. That ageless “GYRO” poster, FFS. People have lost their absolute minds over this.
It’s disgusting and unhinged behavior to threaten and bully people about this. Who cares how a local cafe made their menu? I truly don’t understand what’s going through people’s minds who attack people like this.
her response to the dm about finding some cheap artists says it all. i'm sure she didn't give her employees payment for making the posters in the past either.
Of course she paid them, it was just another task they did while on duty, like brewing coffee or taking out the trash. Surely you’re not expecting her to pay someone who is already on payroll and being paid for their time extra because they’re making posters?
if i'm expected to make coffee and art then it's perfectly reasonable to expect more money than if I'm merely expected to make coffee. whether that comes as part of base salary or as some contract-esque arrangement when art is required of me is the kind of detail we can figure out (or you can try to do it with AI and have a lot of people stop supporting you. your call.)
If making posters is outside of the scope of their normal job duties as it had previously been defined, then yes, absolutely I'd expect them to be paid extra.
Just because they're on payroll and being paid for their time doesn't mean you can instruct them to do anything you ask.
I assure you, a retail workers job description includes doing all sorts of things, many much less pleasant than making signs. I guarantee you the employee assigned to sign making was happy to be doing that over cleaning the bathroom.
And besides, this is the U.S. Unless you’re in a union, responding to legitimate, legal and business-related tasks from your employer (that don’t exceed your ability to accomplish, e.g. not lifting 100lbs or whatever) with “not in my job description” will get you canned.
This is probably correct. But also par for the course. I bet there are coffee shops that give skill bonuses or something like that, but I'm betting most don't.
Most folks who do stuff like this just assume it's part of the job and carry on.
Ouch. Have a little compassion. It is not easy running a small business, even less so when you've got a baby FFS!
> "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 down my legs because I overflowed the pump."
Also, it's one thing to dislike AI to the point where it "kills the mood" (for you) when you see an AI-generated poster, so you stop visiting that particular coffee shop. It's something else entirely to threaten the business owner.
The problem is, they could have literally done nothing instead. They could have apologized to their customers that they've been so busy with their baby that they haven't been able to get a new chalkboard out. They could have left the old chalkboard out and explained politely to people that the new items aren't on it because whoever used to make them left. They could have written (with their hands) the prices and items in halfway-decent hand-writing in a large enough font, and it would have gotten the information across in a way that was perfectly serviceable.
Instead, they chose to exploit people and remove art from the world by using ChatGPT. So no, I don't have a ton of compassion.
To be fair, the “threat” was to post a story to Instagram, so perhaps “warning” is a fairer characterization of what happened.
I do have compassion for the business owner though - lots of mixed signals between people selling AI and the people having been sold AI now rejecting it.
If not even software engineers can keep up (we still see slop posted here regularly), how is a non-tech person supposed to know better. I try to be gentle and/or keep my mouth shut when it’s people who can’t be expected to know better.
I don't get why do you link scummy keyboard warrior behavior with being unemployed?
These are hard times and job loss has become a widespread issue affecting people for all kinds of reasons beyond their control. Using that as a way to insult someone just isn't fair.
Wait a minute. I thought when we didn't like liberals we scolded them for spending $5 on coffee at Starbucks. When did we switch to them being too poor to afford it?
https://archive.is/GSXl6
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.
There are multiple widely replicated common crappy menu styles already. If anything AI generated menus are likely to lift the quality floor.
I recall in particular when I first moved to London and realised you could identify low quality Italian restaurants by whether they had the same laminated plastic dessert menu from some distributor of ready made desserts... The step up was when they'd cut and pasted parts of that menu design into their own template...
And keep in mind we notice the bad examples, because they stand out. They'll fade out of public consciousness as people get better at getting better output out of them, but they're not likely to disappear - menus have clearly been a low priority for a certain subset of places pretty much forever.
If anything, it reliably signals "cheap".
I think there is a big difference between using AI generated food pictures, vs. taking real pictures of your food and using AI to create a menu/poster.
The former is both weird, creepy most of the time, and false advertising. The latter is as you say - the state of the current status quo. I can tell that it's AI, but honestly it's just replacing low-effort human crud for low-effort AI crud. Doesn't bother me at all, it's actually a great use for the technology imo.
As long as it's visibly AI, I don't think it's meaningfully false advertising. The bigger problem with respect to false advertising will be when even the low-effort AI crud is plausible enough that people don't recognise it.
What about the pictures of Chinese food above the counter vs. the actual food you get? There has ALWAYS been a big difference between advertisements and menus and what the food really looks like.
Funnily enough, I was thinking of exactly those photos when writing my comment. I never found them to be all that misrepresentative - that they took a photo from their family friend of their father taken 20 years ago for the same dish they are making me and have it on some faded menu board behind the counter is... honestly pretty close.
It's the fake AI generated "shine" I guess that is the difference to me. Obviously totally made up, not real food, and made to look pretty.
It's mostly the uncanny valley. Both are indeed false advertising, but the AI generated ones are so obviously made up and not real it's a little off putting to me.
Wouldn't really stop me from ordering if I were already there, but it might make me order from their competitor if I were on Uber Eats or whatnot.
And that is true.. but guess what? We should be inventing technologies that DIMINISH and punish this behaviour.
But we ain't. We are doing the exact opposite. Nice.
The best we have is Google reviews lmao.
"If anything, it reliably signals "cheap""
And this my friends is closer to what GI is than solving Navier-Stokes.
I know many... lets say 'intellecutals' here can't fathom it - but it's true.
There's a recent meme of AI-generated representations of food being notably unappetizing, even grotesque and repulsive:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ai-restaurant-food-images
It has this ick about it that makes me feel the owner lost mightily in a crypto pump and dump several times in life.
I imagine that some?/many? customers of a locally-owned coffee shop are choosing it precisely because it's not a soulless megacorp. They're choosing a different vibe on purpose. Ugly AI advertising is the opposite of that vibe.
The food is in the uncanny valley because no human was involved in assembling the output.
We've got millions of years of evolutionary wiring in our heads to try and figure out if something can be eaten - take that out of the process and you can screw up in a bunch of ways which raise alarm bells.
Ancient cave dwellers wandering the steppes, carefully distinguishing potable lattes from poisonous varieties of herbal tea.
Did they know they were doing an expensive AI image detection training run.
Milk aside, lattes and tea aren't modern enough for this attempt at sarcasm to land.
> The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious;
Whereas with non-AI-generated food pics you know that the McPlastic burger you order will look exactly, totally, 100% like the one in the photo.
>>I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction.
Im in India, ordered a bed from a carpenter, a week later he made a great a bed. He took pictures, and used some AI magic had it put it in more grand rooms. He posted it on his Instagram and Facebook feeds.
The next day when I went to him to have it delivered to my place, he showed me he had received lots of offers to make the same bed for other people and his order book was full for the next few months.
Until the robots actually arrive to do his work, AI in many way is going to a huge positive for him. Its going to be the same case for many many such people.
I have some bad news for you:
• The pictures on cereal boxes aren't entirely real, either. They use school glue, not milk.
• Your burger has never looked like the one on the menu (see Falling Down)
• I've never eaten at a Chinese takeaway where the food looked like the light-up menu board, either.
How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?
> How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?
If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture. That said, this is really only a problem for the store in respect of returns. If nobody is returning the product because it didn't look as advertised, there probably isn't any harm being done.
> If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture.
Has food ever looked like the picture, though? I find this position unrealistic outside of an Amazon return excuse.
> Has food ever looked like the picture, though? I find this position unrealistic outside of an Amazon return excuse.
Yeah man it's unrealistic for restaurants to take pictures of the food they make and use that for the menu. Totally.
I'd expect the picture to be an idealized, perfected version of the food. That's how marketing works. But somewhere in there should be the actual food even if it's cold, sprayed with glycerin, and under studio lighting.
An AI image isn't anything to do with the actual dish. That's too far removed from the reality to be considered fair.
Motor oil on a perfect pancake from a batch of 10 that they put 100x more effort into for the photo?
Sign me up, I love it.
AI image of a pancake because the small business owner doesn’t have a Kellog’s budget?
Fuck that guy, I hope his business fails
The point is that it was the same business making the image and the actual food. Now basically every business will have the same abomination of a cheeseburger on their menu because they all prompted the same thing, and as a result customers lose that signal.
So defensively we have to assume the worst, but when we actually do that (or god forbid talk to other people about it) online weirdos like yourself start jumping in front of the bullet.
It was hardly ever the same business making the image and the food.
I'll say that again - when a restaurant has pictures of food, those pictures are often from stock, not actual representative shots of the food the restaurant sells.
This especially applies to fast food and tourist eateries. (Upmarket restaurants don't usually have photos at all.)
Just Eat in the UK has a policy of requiring actual dish shots, but that's not the norm.
Just Eat in the UK has a policy of requiring actual dish shots, but that's not the norm.
Just Eat has recently started allowing AI images, but does tag them as AI.
Hmm. This is not a common occurrence for me (in the US), has happened maybe once in my life that I can remember. I would have exactly the same issue with that, maybe worse since with AI slop I can at least tell before I've spent the money.
Fuck that guy, I hope his business fails
Kellogs need a perfect picture to sell millions of pancakes.
Small business doesn't. They can use a slightly worse picture, or no picture.
This wasn't a problem 2 years ago when the best AI was Midjourney and terrible. It's not a problem today either.
Yes, it has happened at least one time.
I once ordered from a Waffle House once exactly like this:
"I'll have the Texas Bacon Cheesesteak Omelette, with hashbrowns all the way...and I want it to look like the picture."
And to my disbelief, they don't throw a chair at my head.
Instead, the cook came over and asked about that -- usually, they'd finish cooking the omelette filling with the eggs because it tasted better that way, and he wanted to make sure that I wanted the fillings wrapped up as in the photo (kind of like a burrito) instead.
I saw him holding the menu with one hand to use as a reference when plating it. He presented it with a big smile. And, indeed, it did look exactly like the photo in the menu.
Yes? My main experience with menus with pictures is Chinese restaurants where they took a poorly staged and lit photo of the actual dish. Sometimes the real thing ends up looking better than the picture.
>> Has food ever looked like the picture, though?
Er, all the time? In the South East of England, I specifically look for menus with pictures of the food on Just Eats because I can get an idea of how good the food is going to be that way. I don't think I've ever received something that didn't look like what was on the menu pictures. Sometimes people make a nice presentation with fancy dishware and so on (Indian restaurants do that a lot in particular), but the food is always the same as what I get when I order, except it's in a foam box or similar.
This isn't black and white, it's a sliding scale. Advertising, menu boards, box art, etc. do show the product in the best light possible and take artistic liberties, but are substantially closer to the real product than an AI that's never seen the product spitting out an image of a burger.
It's reasonable to be annoyed when the menu board _isn't based on the product at all_ and thus is nowhere close to the real thing.
If I got served food at a restaurant and realized that the pictures were from a different restaurant, I would be pissed off in exactly the same way and amount as if a menu used AI slop. The only difference is that with AI slop you can tell ahead of time and decide not to spend money there.
> has food ever looked like the picture, though?
Yeah. Especially at Asian restaurants. (With predominantly Asian customers.)
If a menu has like clearly painted or drawn images, on the other hand, I weigh them on artistic merit versus anything descriptive.
When most people have a bad experience at a restaurant they never go back, so the harm is hard to quantify until it stacks up.
I don't eat cereal and I can't think of the last time I ate at a restaurant that had pictures on the menu, but to your point I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist.
> I think there's still quite a huge gap between optimized and perfected version of thing that exists versus thing that entirely does not exist
Neither the images created by ChatGPT nor an artists rendition of a latte exist, but based on this logic you’d have a problem with both?
I think most people are just reacting to the careless default style of ChatGPT, or the fact that a human didn’t draw it, not the fact that it’s not “real”.
> I don’t eat cereal
Wow, you really got him with this completely relevant fact that did not at all miss the point.
I agree that it wasn’t a strong response, but 1) we can still be nice and 2) if you read the rest of their comment they do have substantive things to say.
I think it’s relevant in that they lack the personal experience, and so can’t comment on the given points from experience, as they might be expected to.
It's not that it's fake. It's that it has a distinct style.
I once thought that AI image/video would quickly become unidentifiable, but the surprising thing (so far) is that every new model release is followed by two reactions: "This is incredible" to "I recognize this style. It's AI. They're all the same."
It takes only a few weeks. I've been amazed with our mind's ability to move the goalpost.
AI art has made the experience meaningfully less enjoyable.
In the U.S., at least, this is not really true. The FTC has laws that prohibits companies from using non-food products (e.g., glue for milk or motor oil for syrup) in photographs of food they’re selling. They also have laws about deceptive marketing practices. These laws definitely aren’t perfectly enforced, but it’s hardly the widespread problem you’re suggesting it is. Also pretty funny to specifically highlight Chinese food, which has always looked like someone used a disposable camera to hastily snap a photo of a real plate of food about to be given to a customer sometime in 1997 in ~90% of the Chinese restaurants I’ve ever been to.
AI obviously has 0 realness to it. So it’s worse in every way.
In this cases isn’t it that they can use the glue for milk though because they aren’t selling the milk, it’s the cereal (enlarged for texture) that they are selling.
Yes that is true. But, e.g., a restaurant that sells you a bowl of cereal would not be allowed to do this.
Indeed you are correct about this! What I think is different in these cases is that the images of the food in your examples (generally) aim to make it look good, whereas the AI art makes it looks like slop (literally and figuratively).
I also prefer the side case of actual photos of the food, which is common at delis and some more authentic Chinese restaurants; these are also being replaced quickly by AI.
Has AI art made my food less delicious - I don't think I've ever purchased food I've seen first represented by AI, but certainly the expectation of taste affects your perception of it...
Ah, you've been downvoted by the holier than thou "nyeeeh!" crowd.
You are correct though, especially fast food places using air brushed and photoshopped food photos are the inedible food object has been carefully set up.
And no amount of petty votes will change the above.
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> 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.
Full original conversation:
> Guy: Unfortunately if you won't change it I will be sharing it with the community
> Guy: I've love to support you in getting it remade ethically for cheap but if you're not willing to I'm going to let other artists know
> Guy: I understand you didn't know at the time, that's ok. That's why I'm trying to help
> Guy: I'll give you a day to think about it and I'll get you some names and prices of people who could either make a new poster or write up the board for you
> Owner: I have been attacked enough because of this. Disrespected and defeated how people bombarded me with mean comments and DMs. Many have unfollowed me. Go ahead and share if that's what makes you happy.
That's "the threat" the article is referring to. Incredibly bad framing, if you hadn't read the conversation you'd think the guy would have threatened to send armed goons, instead he's telling her he'll give the coffee shop bad press in a local image board.
Not saying I approve, but it's nowhere near as bad as the people who went off on the title alone think it is.
That's actually really bad. The guy is threatening the poor store owner, complete with stupid movie cliches like claiming he's just helping when in fact the intent is absolutely not to help but to bully, threaten and in general wreck the guys business if he doesn't go along with this set of Mafia codes.
Also, you have to consider the context here. The sort of people who make these threats are invariably very left wing, and they have a long history of using violence against anyone they view to be doing harm to their protected classes. Whoever gets this sort of threat will be wondering if some Antifa type is going to throw a rock through their window.
> The sort of people who make these threats are invariably very left wing, and they have a long history of using violence against anyone they view to be doing harm to their protected classes.
The overwhelming majority of political violence in this country comes from the right [0].
You're blinded by ideology, and trying to push a narrative that includes the mafia and antifa. A narrative that doesn't fit the events described in TFA. There is no credible threat of violence, at most the guy will use his platform to bad-mouth her buisness. Antifa doesn't throw bricks at coffee shops because they used AI.
[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-wing-terrorism-and-politi...
Do we know what said account is?
(If I were the coffee shop, I'd seriously weigh how much business versus hassle they're getting from being on Instagram.)
If independent coffee shops serve decent coffee in a good environment with friendly service, they 100% do not need to be on Instagram.
My local coffee shop not only doesn’t have social media, but they don’t even bother decorating the store. Truly unique and amazing coffee, absolutely no design inside. It’s amazing and it really turns people off!
why is talking about this with their community a threat?
It’s more about the way it was phrased and presented. Just sharing publicly available facts with your community (or anyone really) is not a problem in itself, but the message does rub me the wrong way.
The message’s author is trying to present themselves as someone helpful and compassionate (‘I understand’, ‘I’m trying to help’), but at the same time, they’re one-sidedly setting a firm and short deadline (‘I’ll give you a day’) unprompted and suggesting the café owner strike a deal with one of the people they’re going to recommend. They might have written this with good intentions at heart, but it also wouldn’t feel out of place in a mafia setting (as in ‘do business with us, or else’), so it’s a hard sell.
If they really were compassionate and wanted to help, they easily could have suggested to get the owner in touch with some affordable artists and left her with time to mentally deal with the backlash and all. They didn’t need to emphasise how they were going to tell on her like they were about to launch a vendetta smear campaign or something.
HN needing an explanation of how protection rackets work is like looking up money laundering in the dictionary in Office Space.
I agree, they should've just shared it immediately without contacting the owner
There are no good intentions here. This is the mafia playbook through and through - "It would be a pity if something were to happen to your <insert valuable property or reputation here>".
Well, the basic idea of it is not so bad. A business generally wants to keep their customers happy and care for their reputation, so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal.
The important thing is how we go about it, and whether their reputation remains reflective of their actions, or we try and make it worse than it ought to be. We can’t say for certain the author of the message was going to do the latter, but it does not inspire good faith.
> Well, the basic idea of it is not so bad.
It's textbook extortion.
> so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal.
Telling a business we're going to fuck you up unless you send our friends work, even by implication, is literally extortion.
I wrote my comment with the assumption that the ‘basic idea’ was intentionally making reputation worse on account of poor behaviour, and communicating that to the business owner. Of course, if you imagine the basic idea to be the extortive aspect, then it is literally extortion.
Threatening to damage the reputation of the business unless the business paid their friends to redo the art.
It's only not extortion if you ignore the extortative parts.
> "A business generally wants to keep their customers happy and care for their reputation, so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal."
Yes, except this case isn't about a customer—it's a disgruntled vendor (commercial artist) acting on behalf of an association of other vendors. Not (AFAICT) on behalf of real customers.
A customer complaining about their needs and preferences is useful feedback.
A vendor whom you have no business relationship with (and want none) is not helpful.
If they criticize your business practices in public, that's certainly their right. But, if they're threatening to do that, with an attached demand of commercial services to them (or to their associates), that's something else. It's the linked demand for payment that loses them all legitimacy. (Possibly even into criminal racketeering; I'm not an expert).
Certainly, but considerate the alternative: the account simply publicly posts about a public posting (not private business). Which happens all of the time for public ridicule or shame. At least this provides some recourse for the person affected. Sure, the alternative is simply to not post in the first place; but such is the nature of large social media accounts.
In this case, the account clearly stated: -
1.) We don't like your poster so you better remove it or we'll badmouth you within our network.
2.) You have 1 day to comply.
3.) You can instead work with an artist we will recommend (aka connected to us), and we'll cease.
Textbook mafia-style extortion.
I don’t deny that based on the screenshot there is both strong-arming and a lack of sympathy or empathy from the other account towards the fact that it seems like many people are just using AI tools without giving it a second thought.
However, I’m just pointing out that as far as the implications of the threat goes, in most instances it would’ve just happened anyway, without a “warning”, because people simply post things to make fun of them and mock them. Sometimes those accounts might at least anonymize their subjects, but this might be a name them and shame them type situation.
It's an implied threat, which you can infer from the presentation of the information. For example:
You really should listen to me. If you need some time to think it over, I understand. It's a lot to consider and you've got a lot in your plate. I'll check in soon - would tomorrow be okay? If you need more time, just tell me when.
vs
You really should listen to me. I'll give you a day to think it over before I take further action.
Same information, but the latter assumes a position of authority (I, the person in charge, will be the provider of the time you will receive), and then uses that position to provide an ostensible benevolence as a way to mitigate the implied follow up of non-benevolence. The threat is introduced as the power disparity. The person in power has leverage over the less powerful and the threat is that they will use it. Remove the power disparity, and the implication of threat is also removed.
Unions also use the threat of striking as a leverage point against corporations. As I noted elsewhere in this thread, there seems to be a common fallacy in this thread of "threat = bad". Laws are threats too. You need a more convincing argument than this.
Yes, we know labor cartels abuse their powers. Doesn't change the point at hand
My comment is about how inference and implication can change the result of a message just as much as the content or context. Whatever axe you've got to grind about threats being bad has nothing to do with what I said. Laws are threats. Unions make threats. So what? My point stands. Things that are obviously threats are threats, and things that say the same things in different ways might not be threats.
"Threat" is a correct term for an attempt to compel action via potential negative consequences.
By that definition all laws are threats. And indeed, the fallacy here seems to be assuming that threat = bad.
Laws are threats. The difference is that we empower the government to threaten us to maintain social order, we do not empower individuals to threaten each other.
"Nice business you've got here, shame if something happened to it"
Its implied the talk is to rally the troops not gather general opinion
Sharing it with the community could have negative impact on her business. So they were threatening her business success by sharing the info in a certain form with the community.
This. Based on the headline I was expecting a physical threat on the owner, instead we get a screenshot of them treating it as a learning opportunity and the owner responding in an incredibly condescending way.
"treating it as a learning opportunity"
You can learn to pay me, or you can learn the consequences of refusing to pay me. It's your choice of learning opportunity! ;)
It literally is not. You can maybe phrase it to sort of sound like a threat but “I’m going to share your public ad” is never a threat. It’s like if you angrily yell “I’m going to come to a complete stop at this upcoming stop sign!” in a threatening voice and then do that, it wasn’t a threat. Great. That’s what the sign is for. That’s what everyone wants you to do.
In the context of how it was done, saying that they would give them a list of people and a day to think it over, it really is a threat, it's a kind of extortion.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what extortion is. It's only extortion if the one extorting is the one receiving the benefit. Hiring a random artist on Fiverr would still make them happy (since the poster is not AI) but would not benefit them in any way.
That's not what the "threat" said. It said that they would give them a list of people, it isn't obvious that hiring some random would have made them happy. It's not even obvious whether this wasn't just a convenient way to make some money for a friend.
I understand if you don't like how the person phrased it, but the goal of the DM was obviously to get the store owner to replace the AI poster. Assuming that they would have gone on a crusade because they didn't pick a "preferred artist" is pure unsupported speculation on your part.
It comes across as spiteful, I don't think it is at all obvious and it isn't obvious to the store owner either.
We just disagree, and that's why this is the wrong approach to enacting whatever kind of change they wanted.
There is arrogance behind the use of "obviously" here.
It is worth pointing out that the article doesn’t even imply that the business suffered any negative outcome here (ie damage or loss of sales etc.) It also doesn’t implied that the person threatened that the business might suffer any negative outcome, just that they would talk about the ad that the business made and put out for people to see and share.
This article is very careful not to actually elaborate on what the “threat” might’ve meant because I’d imagine that baselessly speculating out loud about what they imagine it could be would open them up to getting sued.
It’s all just uwu smol bean coffee shop chiropractor bullied by mean anti-ai mob dreck
Search for "but at what cost" and you'll see news companies do it all the time.
You'll find these ridiculous headlines like, "Company cures cancer, but at what cost."
Saying you’ll do something that’ll harm someone (or, more precisely in this instance, their business) can reasonably be called a threat (in the broad sense of the word), though not necessarily the unfair kind of threat most people imagine when they say ‘threat’.
You can threaten someone with ceasing to be a customer if they don’t change their business practices, and that’s perfectly fine. Sharing publicly available information is generally not a problem, either. But in this case, the author of the message is coming off as very insincere, setting deadlines, and trying to strike up deals, which comes off as unreasonable and makes one wonder if they really are simply going to share publicly available information, or if they’re going to give undue focus over them being ‘uncooperative’. If they did not want their message to come off as a threat, this was very far from an ideal way to write it.
Can you quote the words in the article where somebody said that the business was or would be hurt
Because if not that would mean that this is an article about a threat that somebody imagined in their head
Hey now, these folks are -really enjoying- their highly contrived version of the events. How dare you limit their enjoyment by recontextualizing this into what most of my non-highly-online friends would view as the "normal" understanding.
As a person who went through and eventuall rejected the culture-jamming adbusters thoughts in the early 2000s, it's really hard for me to view a threat to share an ad as anything other than a "threat" to increase the "organic reach of the ad" or whatever "metric" that folks here would use.
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.
i generally go to the store where the coffee tastes better
Not if the slop marketing subsequently gives me indigestion
Agreed. That's actually what OP said as well.
Using AI to make a sign is likely a pretty good indicator as to the effort the owner puts into other aspects of their business.
Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it. I'd feel differently if some big corporate chain were doing this, but if it's a little "mom & pop"/"hole in the wall" type place, cheap advertising is a neutral-to-positive signal.
> Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it.
Why? When you see a derelict pizzeria, you don't think "they must be devoting all their energy to making good pizzas!". Similarly, that a coffee shop owner uses AI for branding is a big signifier of their laziness or lack of attention to detail.
If I'm lining up to order from a shabby old school bus with a menu in the window written in sharpie on a piece of cardboard, I know I'm a couple minutes away from tucking into some banging tacos.
It only signals to me that they have other priorities.
Correct, but they own a coffee shop, they aren't building rockets. The menu is definitely a significant part of it.
If they can barely do that, then I'm sure they're slacking off on more stuff too.
> The menu is definitely a significant part of it
The overlap in skills between photographing your product and being a great barrista aren't obviously overlapping.
The takeaway seems to be to remove images from the menu.
You think this is a signal of some great barista?
Starbucks has an amazingly polished corporate image and at least where I'm from the locales have great wall art done by local artists presented alongside tasteful decor and a minimalistic but well cared for choice of furniture that I can't honestly give it no less than a 9/10 presentation.
The coffee still tastes like a Victorian chimney sweeper's piss.
H... how do you know?
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As a customer yes, I would have vastly higher confidence in the quality of a coffee shop with no pictures vs one that uses AI slop.
Why?
I’m not GP but this hits for me so I’ll reply in good faith
I don’t actually care about the menu or sign. It’s a coffee drink and I’ve had thousands if not hundreds of thousands of them. I know what I like and if it’s just stencil letters pinned on a cork board I don’t care. I just want to grab a coffee and go.
A shop with no pictures, just words? Sends a message that their coffee is probably good enough to speak for itself. Fine.
A shop with hand drawn lettering, ornate art? The coffee is probably made by people who care about their craft in some fashion. At least the person making my coffee probably enjoys their job a little. Fine.
Fully AI menu with gen Ai modeled drink pictures? The drink isn’t going to look like that. There is obviously no effort made here. They spent time to create a generic menu my kids could have put together. Worst of the lot, to be honest.
It was just a replacement for those temporary chalkboard menus, the person wo did that previously left. Perhaps she has bad taste but that doesn't mean she was slacking off. Did they spend a lot of time on the chalkboard menus previously?
Just printing this item was reported in the article as costing $150.
How much might it cost to have someone local show up and produce a decent-looking chalkboard display?
This is what people are actually mad about when businesses use AI art. You claim to live in an artistic community, great, ask your staff if they have any friends who draw who want to come by and make a quick $100. You spent more money on a worse result that alienates your community.
Honestly, I'd rather have a word printed doc for the menu than this. It's not that difficult, doesn't require any skills and doesn't take any time.
IDK, you own a business and do this sort of stuff and all sorts of red flags go off for me.
Where do you draw the line? Is buying already roasted coffee beans a sign they are slacking off instead of roasting it themselves?
What if they use a machine grinder instead of a hand grinder?
My coffee shop barely has a menu. None of the current roasts are listed anywhere, you have to ask and they change daily. No signage. It’s consistently the best coffee I’ve had. Not fussy but very very good.
They do slack off on cleaning the chairs and the decor, that’s for sure. The coffee though is phenomenal.
> It only signals to me that they have other priorities
Yes, priorities other than their business.
Unless they use the time they previously spent making a sign into making a better coffee.
How would a coffee shop spend an hour making their coffee better
Like you own a coffee shop and you’ve freed up one hour in the 12 weeks before you have to make a new sign, what do you do in that hour that makes the coffee better?
Spending the money you would have wasted on a flaky local artist to draw an overpriced disposable sandwich board on better coffee beans.
The entitlement is off the charts. The more I read this insanity, the more I hope she printed it at Walmart with a discount coupon.
This is really repulsive. This kind of trolling makes me feel like donating to a local data center out of spite.
Absolutely not. My local kebab shop 100% uses AI for their menus and signage. It’s delicious. He does not have time or the desire to worry about the provenance of the menus.
It’s a pretty good indicator the owner bought a ChatGPT or Canva subscription, that’s about it.
I wonder if they worry about the provenance of their meat. Might be delicious but you might be eating horse.
Yes. It's a sign they spend a lot of effort making good coffee and don't have a lot of effort left over to work on a sign.
The environment the coffee is served in is a significant part of the business.
Somehow I don't think that's the tradeoff being made
They own the business, they don't make the coffee, nor did they make the sign they had earlier.
> They own the business, they don't make the coffee
You might not have spent a lot of time in the world of "small business", but this is hysterically out of touch.
The article literally mentions that they have baristas, one of whom was making the old menu because they were "aesthetically inclined." This can also be confirmed by looking at the employment section of their website.
The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.
I don't follow. Even a little bit.
Every single small coffee shop owner I know has employees. They work alongside them and do every job in the shop along with them. They operate in shifts, sometimes the owner is there for both open and close.
What does hiring a barista have to do with not making coffee yourself?
Gonna go with the "hilariously out of touch" comment. These places rarely print money to the point an owner can be an absentee manager type.
You're pretending not to comprehend the simple concept of a barista.
I can see you're not interested in a good faith conversation here. I'm not going to waste any more of my time. Feel free to keep on berating me if it makes you feel better.
The most fitting description of an owner of a small coffee shop is "barista". Most barista's I know also handle far more than just making coffee and serving customers. They do everything short of being personally financially responsible for the business itself.
It's quite clear that if anyone was operating in bad faith here, it's not the commenters challenging your position. Small business ownership is almost always simply a riskier version of having the job you're also hiring for with a very small chance of upside. Usually at lower pay.
In this particular case the owner was simply doing a task other barista's like herself were doing as part of the regular job of a barista.
> The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.
This is the part I do not follow. Of course she is? What small coffee shop owner do you know does not personally make or serve the coffee on a regular basis? The only way not to take your original post in bad faith is to not understand your meaning.
The role of the customer in the market is to choose the best quality for the lowest price.
If you take anything else into consideration you are a bad customer that damages the market.
the only "threat" mentioned in the article is that someone said that if she didn't take the sign down they would post about it in a local artist community. Threatening people with violence is always unwarranted, but trying to portray talking with other people about what someone is doing as a "threat" is disingenuous.
I think that issuing an ultimatum where if the person does not do what you want, that you will be sharing your concerns with likeminded people online, with the underlying implication being that the business owner will end up experiencing some kind of negative outcome from that, is absolutely a threat.
Exactly. Pure cancel culture. Just be humble to understand the world might not agree with your views and let it be. Less "this can't exist" and more of "this is not for me".
It's not cancel culture to bad-mouth a business and refuse them your patronage.
People are vocal about what they feel passionate about, and a world where they weren't or couldn't sounds hellish to me. How would society ever progress? We'd still have "whites only" restaurants in that world.
Not saying that justifies all anger targeted at business owners, but a blanket "criticism bad" stance is a bit silly. You have to make an actual argument as to why you think the anti-AI crowd is misguided in this case.
Cancel culture or not, people are allowed to tell other people they know that something is happening, and those people can decide for themselves to patronize the business or not. To call it a threat is really exaggerating.
The headline makes it sound like people are phoning in bomb threats and violence, which doesn't seem to be happening at all.
Honestly, I think the business owner should have ignored these weak "threats" altogether. It doesn't have anything to do with coffee and it's unlikely they'll get any business because they use AI, so it can only hurt them.
I get you think the word is too heavy but remember: it's a small business and bad press is a serious thing. It could be enough to shut down the place. Just see how afraid local shop owners are of Yelp. You get review bombed there and you have a serious problem. You don't know if these artists won't just unload their (just) frustration at AI on the business exactly like that. By judging the tone "change or I'll tell the artists", it's very likely the person would try to incite them instead of just "telling" them.
If the Montgomery Bus Boycott happened today most Americans would call it cancel culture.
Okay, but I (and I suspect a lot of people) really don't care if somebody is threatened in that way. If the business person doesn't want other people to know what they're doing then maybe they shouldn't do it. It's not worthy of a news article, IMO.
If somebody threatens them with violence (which is what "threat" is usually implying) then that's a different thing entirely.
If I tell someone that I am going to take a coordinated effort to undermine their business and get customers to stop shopping there, potentially resulting in the demise of the business, the loss of their livelihood and ability to provide for themselves or their family, I cannot think of any reasonable person who would not categorize that as a threat. A threat by no means is limited to violence only.
I am really disturbed by language minimizes concrete actions taken to cause harm.
"I am not hurting your business I am just talking to my friends!"
Sorry, but the business owner has to own their actions. If they have a large customer base of artists who will feel betrayed by their using AI, then it was a mistake to use it.
It's her right to use AI, but the customers also have the right to say they won't patronize businesses who use AI, and are free to tell people they know that the business is using it.
If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
If the "business owner needs to own their actions", shouldn't the people who are seeking to take a coordinated effort to harm that business also "own their actions" and be able to say plainly what they are doing instead of misrepresenting it via "Stop being crazy, I'm not making threats, I'm just talking to my friends" gaslighting nonsense?
> If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
To entertain this analogy, if a shop is misrepresenting their ingredients then it can make sense to spread the word, particularly if the shop owner refuses to rectify the issue, because there are health implications which represent a legitimate material harm to their customer base and the safety issue takes priority over the shop owner's bottom line.
An AI menu, assuming it offers a reasonable representation of what the shop offers, has no safety issue.
AI stealing their jobs isn't a "legitimate material harm"?
It doesn't matter anyway, because "using AI" doesn't make somebody a protected class. If people don't want to patronize businesses that use AI, there's nothing wrong with that.
> AI stealing their jobs isn't a "legitimate material harm"?
No, if you have to make several indirect causal leaps, to get from "shop owner uses ChatGPT instead of MS Word to generate a menu" to "somewhere a graphic designer loses their employment" it is not legitimate. And if that is how you interpret the world, virtually any harmful or even violent action can be rationalized in the name of stopping some probabilistic harm.
Sticking with your cow's milk analogy, serving the wrong milk to the wrong customer with a dairy allergy can cause immediate harm to their health. Generating an AI menu cannot be reasonably interpreted as causing direct harm to anyone.
> If people don't want to patronize businesses that use AI, there's nothing wrong with that.
I completely agree. But making a personal choice to not visit a business and undertaking a coordinated effort to organize a boycott against a business is in a different category altogether.
Did you not read the article? She was unaware of the controversy and had just had a baby - which tends to be quite a stressful and time consuming thing.
The milk comparison is specious and irrelevant, because consumers are there for the product. Coffee shops sell coffee, not jpegs.
But aside from that - bullying and threatening a working mother with a newborn is not the moral high ground you seem to believe it is.
She's not a witch, and your assumed right to burn her is not a good look.
To be fair to the news, there probably wasn't much else happening in Buffalo NY
"It would be a pity if I were to tarnish jlarocco's reputation within my network. I even have his GitHub from his profile. I'll just talk shit about him to all the CTOs on the block and ensure he doesn't get a job again..."
See how that works? That's why you should care. The so-called influencer-orienter culture has become a plague after social media. And these F&B businesses are the ones hit hardest - remember all those movies in the 90s and 00s about how some up and coming entrepreneur or chef had to win the approval of some hoity-toity food journalist?
Also, rest assured, I'm not serious about badmouthing you or anyone here for that matter - just trying to illustrate a point.
Oh, I get it, but it only works if the "influencer" can actually influence a large enough group of customers, and my bet is that they can't.
If it were me, I would have called their bluff and ignored them.
In that analogy, you SHOULD assume the person is an influencer.
In the case of this shop, we're talking about local retail. If you are a retail small business owner you have to assume that any customer can be an "influencer" and cause significant harm if they seek to trash your business online.
Oh, please. You know what they're threatening: an internet mob. That's not just "talking".
It was literally just talking, though.
As a rule, small business owners (as well as HN's population of temporarily embarrassed tech workers) treats being asked to not take as much profit as possible like being stabbed with a knife
Nobody threatened the business owner. Somebody offered the business a chance to change up the ad (and help doing so) before it got shared, and the owner figured it would be better to go viral with the slop ad. Now there’s an article in Business Insider painting the business as the victim of mean customers that assaulted it by not liking the slop poster, so it looks like it all worked out for them.
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.
im like you, simply out of apathy. but i immediately thought, "if were the coffee shop owner, would i rather experience a silent decline in business or face public outrage but have an opportunity for redemption?"
ive been called enough mean names by friends and strangers id much rather be called some more mean names in order to become aware of what i could do to win back some customers
I guess you don't realize that half of the stuff you're seeing is already AI. What you probably mean is low quality unreviewed stuff.
I would once again like to point out that the "threat" mentioned in the article is someone saying they'll talk about what the shop owner did with their friends.
"post about it in a local artist community" is not exactly "talk about it with their friends."
It's bullying.
And if the shop owner is Jewish, it would be anti-semitism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
I consider a boycott threat a non-violent threat; legal but an exercise of power that has moral dimensions.
Imagine if it said "post about it on Hacker News". That's not bullying
It's informing people that there is something a business is doing that they might not approve of and they might want to change their behaviour accordingly.
In the same way that sealioning is just a debate strategy.
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.
From a more... pessimistic/optomistic point of view (I'm really not sure which applies here, it depends how you look at it) It is also about a culture with absolutely no safety net, where AI and increased automation moving into someones field (in this case, graphic design work) isn't just "oh, less people will need my services" and more "My income will completely disappear and I will be broke/homeless faster than I can possibly learn something else fast enough to compete with the omnipotent AI".
The way to make these transitions less aggressive on everyone is to not have it tied directly to whether or not someone can afford to eat.
I think that’s letting people off the hook too easily. This sort of mob behaviour is simply normal. Normal means something that happens often, not something we find admirable. With a safety net it would be the same sort of thing - people decide that x is bad and dogpile it to get their dopamine. Some people really like the dogpiling, others like it less, but it calls to an ugly part of our psychology.
I agree that people like the dogpile, but those dog-piles are normally starts by someone who feels like they are personally victimized and threatened by whatever action they are objecting to.
People take things very personally when their core livelihood and ability to support themselves are threatened.
I love this, what a pleasant take./
I dislike AI because it represents the state's power to automatically surveil mass populations and automate everything from labor it's use of force in warfare.
Please, do go on about how the folks who find the aesthetic around that repugnant in a way that hand-drawn-chalkboards are the "real threat".
Except that corporations are not people (well, except one place). A power imbalance between corporations and humans is enough to justify a lot of non-violent behavior which may be considered non-ethical to fellow people, but totally fine towards a corpo. Boycott is one of such traditional ways.
Btw. notice how boycott is often perceived as ok to good, while "cancel culture" as bad, while both are identical if the target is corporation.
Imo, artists boycotting any corporation for any reason at all, even if the Ouija board told them so, are completely justified.
>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
This has always been a thing.
I think you’re right actually. It has always been a thing, but I think maybe we were better at suppressing it in the past. It seems like this sort of open, grassroots warfare is new.
It doesn't help when the US President not only openly encourages it but also officially forgives people perpetrating it on his behalf.
What should we expect when it's coming from the top?
The two sides are more similar than you give them credit for.
Thats true. This story makes me think artists are spoiled and entitled little shits, which isn’t fair to all of them of cause.
I don’t think it’s the artists who are doing things like this. It’s usually people who aren’t directly impacted and are “working” on other people’s behalf who do this sort of thing. I suspect it’s power-seeking personalities using a socially acceptable excuse to exercise power over someone else.
No it's about people thinking that I should care about their business when they clearly do not. When you use AI in these lazy ways it's clear that you just don't care.
That doesn’t even make sense. If you’re a customer before she puts up the sign it hasn’t magically made the coffee or the service worse. You want to force her to act the way you want, it’s that simple.
This comment is a great example of what the parent is describing
Dude, small business owners only have so much to spend on marketing. Before it was AI, it was stock images or Microsoft clip art. I don't care that my plumber has bad logo, it saving money on a logo keeps him from selling to PE and enshittifying his business.
> 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.
I agree to a degree - it feels manipulative on the part of the writer, trying to exaggerate any sympathy a reader might feel.
That said, I also feel that the level of negativity the lady suffered was a little out of proportion to her 'crime' - essentially amounting to bullying.
This reads like fetish fiction. Maybe it is.
https://x.com/zackfox/status/1036389932854652928
ya it's cheap sympathy-raising and should be condemned
Well I for one found it quite titillating
I prefer to see the real actual food i am about to buy on menus. I hate when i get it and it looks nothing like the menu photo. But companies like mc donalds have been deceiving people for decades with help of pro photographers and designers. In this case the sign is pretty and it is clear the items are just drawings. I think it is cool for small biz owners to be able to help themselves with AI. It would probably be better if she used real actual pics of her products with a phone and asked AI to put those inbthe sign in the same stylized way.
Ok, but it’s a coffee shop. An Americano looks the same as drip coffee. A cold brew looks the same as an iced americano.
Where i go to have good coffee, these look different because they are served in different cups and presented differently.
I feel quite bad for her. If you aren’t in the know (chronically online), I don’t think it’s obvious whatsoever that using AI for a poster could be seen as unethical. I doubt she even expected anyone to point it out.
At the same time though, even if time or budget is tight enough that you’d want to use AI, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t still use real photos for the menu items. This style that the AI apparently defaults to is kinda somewhat passable-ish, until you get to the food items which often look like they would inflict you with several status effects.
I don't think it has to be about ethics at all. People might just be turned off by digital illustrations of food that could pass as creatures from a Ridley Scott film. I'm also a little surprised that this remains the aesthetic that AI continues to go with. With the top end being AI actresses giving major news outlet interviews, have basic free tier models not advanced beyond cosmic horror food?
Have _any_ image generation models advanced beyond cosmic horror food? I don't think I've ever seen AI-generated food images that don't look severely off-putting. We're fairly attuned to food that looks _wrong_.
It’s interesting you know, back when music piracy was first a thing online, there was a popular idea, even backed by some research I think, that music piracy didn’t impact sales because people wouldn’t have had the money to buy that music otherwise.
The theory was that piracy might actually increase sales due to more exposure of the music to consumers.
AI generated art, AI generated anything really, is very close to piracy, but nobody is making that argument anymore.
I think this is because the positions are reversed - the general public were motivated to find and spread vacuous reasons that piracy was neutral to good as it benefited them. When the general public might be harmed, instead of corporate rights-holders, then it becomes an unambiguous moral wrong.
So it’s never really been about right and wrong, it’s just about who benefits. Like everything I guess.
Why should corporations be given rights equal to humans? I see no problem to okaying one activity for individuals but banning it from businesses and corporations.
Because corporations are organizations of people?
No one actually has to care about the well-being of corporations. There are no corporations in the Bible.
Decades ago when corporations were taking over the world, they used to justify it as a proxy for eventual benefits to the standard of living of regular people. I guess now we don't even bother.
Doesn't the bible treat collective institutions as moral actors all the time? And why are you using the bible as your grounding, not every one shares Christian morality
Using this article as an example, there's a severed lack in intentionality in generative images. At a glance, a few questions already come to my mind:
Why are lines coming out of the cups?
Why are there coffee drip lines?
Why is the pumpkin on the left but everything else is next to the mugs?
Why are the mugs of slightly different shapes? (Excluding cold brew)
Why are the descriptions of all four items of wildly different lengths?
Generative is not attentive.
This ticked me off. People need to lay tf off the AI use bashing. If someone doesn't want to support a business or whatever because of X, then quietly take yourself and your negativity elsewhere. Don't make yourself a nuisance because people's choices don't line up with your bias.
Im shocked she spent so much to get it printed. The design looks so cheap
Taste differs among people
Let’s just say it: most people have no taste.
Most people don't have yours
"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.
5 minutes? I'll have spent more time writing this comment and posting the image to imgur than I did having the bot produce that image in the first place.
And here it is: https://imgur.com/6C3zWcD
It's not grand at all; just an informative sign about some fall specials that is direct and to the point. (Nothing about it was done by hand, but nothing about it would get people all torches-and-pitchforks, either.)
Exactly. What we are really talking about is people lacking taste. People don’t want to see shit graphic design. At the state fair this year, all the food places and rides were covered an obvious low quality ai image work. The difference between acceptable and gross can be as simple as a prompt tweak.
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.
I wouldn't call pointing out a business's activities and shop features as much of a threat. You either live with your business choices or change them.
Business is not entitled to people's patronage, they can refuse them for any reason. They are not and should not be shielded from public opinion.
You have to wonder?
Neither, the biggest danger is being a chiropractor (her main job), taking people's money and wasting their time with useless treatments.
The relevant question is how much comments on Instagram actually translate to changes in sales.
If I’m going to a coffee shop, I might not like the AI coffee sign, but it’s much more important to me how good the coffee is and how expensive it is.
"Endeladyze", "Endelaydsze". Painful to read this poor kartveli gogo's gvari being butchered like that. Get a proof-reader, people.
I have no problem with coffee shops intentionally using AI, that said...
It's also worth keeping in mind that a shop owner might google "clip art cup of coffee" and the result was created by somebody who used AI, and the shop owner wouldn't necessarily realize it. At some point, 99% of clip art available online is going to be AI.
The sign looks awesome. haters gonna hate
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.
Much like CGI in movies, you only notice bad CGI.
I mean there's a pretty big third group there which recognizes the good parts and the bad parts. Right?
For every person who can spot it a mile away I wonder how many false positives they have or simply aren't aware of it. If you're looking for it, with people using it a lot these days, of course you are going to have a high success rate.
But really I don't think it falls neatly into either of those categories.
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.
Edit: even in this comment section there are a lot of people who are bitter about this (which showed up since I started typing this). Goes to show how important it is.
Personally I will not fault any individual for following a norm that they do not have the perspective to reject. So I think the coffee shop owner and the critics both screwed up here, by participating in shame-culture on both sides. However they did not know they could do differently---nobody has demonstrated to them the harm and degradation of their actions, nor what the alternative is. But as analytical outsiders we can make that observation and put it to use later by not practicing that behavior ourselves, and by helping others learn to not practice it either.
first ill address your point and anecdotally i think this is sort of how "normal" people apologize now. i find it gross, personally, but its so ubiquitous ive learned to tune it out
why i actually replied: would have been an excellent punch line if the apology post was clearly ai gen chock full of clauddish. not sure if id come back around to respecting the owner, but id laugh for sure
I think it is how people apologize normally because it's a norm, yes, but it's to everyone's detriment. They don't like it, the people receiving it don't care about it, it's not a real apology, it's just a sort of trapped norm that needs to change. That's why I bothered to point it out.
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.
A lot of this stuff again seems like labor augmentation not replacement, like in this article. She wasn't using professional paid artists previously, but a mix of her own extra labor (which she had less time for with a baby) & a barista who drew well (but had recently left). Most small businesses are like this.
I'm not an AI booster, but I think GenZ particularly have really lost their mind with the anti-AI rage.
I was handing out flyers at a fundraiser, for a charity to promote their next event. The flyers were made by a staff member using some AI art.
Some GenZ kid started ranting to me about how the flyers were AI slop and how some artist would have been willing to do the job, blah blah blah.
Kid, its a charity event that I'm volunteering for on a beautiful sunny summer weekend day for.. it's gonna raise like $10k if we are lucky.. no artist was going to paid with or without AI.
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
> 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?
Or, for that matter - skip the photos, just do text, maybe with a few bits of clip art if you're feeling daring. Photos are hardly essential for coffee drinks, which tend to all look the same in real life anyway.
OMG, Trader Joe's uses clip art from another century, probably not the most recent one.
I am now recalling all of Dad's clip art books!!
I am not a connoisseur of fine coffee drinks, just get me out of my morning daze! So, I can't say if the "specials" really need their own photos.
Perhaps to justify the price?
But as for me, a vent fan blowing out of the shop will do it every time.
People are bombarded with crappy genAI graphics and even if they can't articulate what about it they dislike aesthetically, I believe most are able to draw the short line from the bad, piss-filter, fake-ghibli slop they see to the social/environmental ills most associate with AI. I have mixed thoughts on shame as a tool for social cohesion but in my mind it's a positive that use of genAI for artistic purposes seems like it's nearly universally panned and people trying to pass off the output as their own are (rightfully) clowned.
The text exchange in the article with the thinly veiled threat is exactly how you'd expect someone disempowered (and it's not like working artists pre AI times had a ton of capital to begin with) to act when they are given some power. As we continue displacing, or attempting to displace, individuals up the value chain, I think we'll continue to see echoes of this kind of behavior. When the luddites can't break into the factory to smash the machines, smashing the outputs and users of the machine seems like the obvious choice.
The follow up instagram post, so the one after she showed off her awful looking sign:
Why does business insider make it seem like she's seething angry about this situation when the actual content of the response instagram post seems very level headed. (Rhetorical question, I know why.) Bam, perfect, hit everything a PR firm would tell you to say to make this go away as quickly as possible...Talking to business insider was exactly the wrong thing to do after that. Your sign looks bad. You've made the awful mistake of telling more people about your bad sign with the intent of making them feel sympathetic. Even if they feel sympathetic, people still look at the bad sign you made in desperation along with the framing from BI and think... "oh so maybe she shouldn't be running a cafe then. This seems like she's barely getting by at this point".
On the flip side, telling someone "pay my artist friend or else I'll go out of my way to tell people primed to hate you based on a single detail, about only that 1 single detail" is actual old-school extortion.
Everyone in this story is tiring and annoying.
It honestly sounds like a good filter if you don't want "crazy anti-AI people" at your shop
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.
That's certainly true.
It is also true that as a consumer, I do have a right to feel contemptuous towards garish design and the freedom to spend my money elsewhere.
[flagged]
Please don't sneer like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For $150 or less, I bet they could have hired a fiverr person to come over for two hours and letter the chalkboard.
This reads to me like a YouTube AI thumbnail. If you go to a lot of trouble to make a product and then you punt the last and probably easiest step in the process, makes me not want to engage with the product.
Reading headlines with this increasingly common format makes me irrationally angry.
Half of anti ai bigots use ai chat every week.
Internet morality is about seeking reasons to hate.
As a society we need to start seriously planning on how to ban AI in art.
- I don’t want to listen music with AI generated vocals or tunes.
- I don’t want to watch TV shows or movies with AI generated scripts.
- I don’t want to read novels with AI generated text
- I don’t want to see animations with any amount of AI in it.
- I don’t want to play video games made by any amount of AI. (No FCKIN Blender models made with AI)
- I don’t want any amount of my digital art or posters to be touched by AI.
I think as a part of alignment all AI models above a certain size should refuse requests to generate stories, scripts any art object etc. text-to-image, text-to-music, text-to-videos should just be banned outright, I don’t see any good use case for them outside of art.
If society cannot agree to do the above then at the very least, we should have a way to easily know if AI was involved in any of the art I interact with, so that I can avoid it with a ten foot pole.
I say this as an early adopter and lover of technology in general, I bought the Vision Pro the day it came out, I bought experimental volumetric displays, experimental robot vacuums, I own 2 robot arms, LED panels etc. but generative AI in art just leaves me with disgust, I want no part of it.
Going from "I don’t personally want to consume AI art" to "the government and every major AI lab should prevent everyone else from making it" is precisely the sort of thing that makes schadenfreude such a useful word. :)
It seems like a ban would both be overreaching and won't happen. If your personal preference is to not engage with it, then don't.
I don’t see why a president can’t write a “No Generative AI in art” executive order, society has banned plenty of other pointless stuff, I would vote for them to ban this.
They can do that but it would be a huge overreach. I guess you have strong feelings about it, but plenty of us don't want it banned.
I think there are plenty of us, outside of tech circles who want it banned too. It is one of the least popular technologies in existence. Unfortunately I don’t think it will be banned anytime soon, but I do hope we eventually ban it.
Heard this morning on NPR show: The 3 areas were AI fails from the get-go.
Creativity
Taste
Judgement
> "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?
Sounds like she was undervaluing her previous employee's artistic skills.
Indeed, artists provide a very valuable service. It's a shame the AI industry feels they're replaceable when they're obviously not.
But...they really don't? Everyone is replaceable, there's nothing special about artists.
Their price is based on supply and demand just like everything. If AI decreases demand or raises supply then their price will go down.
Basic economic theory states that only holds if the goods / services being provided are equivalent in the eyes of consumers. It seems self evident here that consumers do not consider them equivalent.
You said that the AI industry feels they're replaceable. I'm not saying that AI does equivalent work, I'm saying that AI companies don't choose the prices for art, they just play in the market.
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.
> 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'
The issue comes when you (or someone, not you personally) dig way to deep into what "it" is, there is always something that someone was, to quote you, "too lazy to do yourself". You might not like the result, and that's fine, but you're phrasing it as if the other person is just being unnecessary-lazy.
They probably bought their display stands instead of designing and building them themselves. They also probably bought the cheap ones from Amazon (instead of building them themselves, or hiring a local artisanal carpenter to build them).
Do you refuse to engage with a pastry stand because the owner was "too lazy to do it themselves"? If you're at a friends house and they order food, do you refuse to engage with it because "they were too lazy to cook it themselves"? Where do you draw the line?
Your point as it applies to something that takes a sufficient portion of your time is valid, but this conversation is literally about a menu sign at a coffee shop. If you spent substantial time engaging with a coffee shop sign, I have questions (and wouldn't want to be behind you in that line).
I would take those stances if they didn't spend any real time picking out or curating their furnature and goods.
If they spent time more time curating better AI images or asked anybody with modern taste and style what they thought we probably wouldn't be talking about it.
Too lazy?
I bet anything you never ran a small business of any sort.
I think you missed the point. I was using the parent commenters "too lazy" language. Small business owners are very often drastically overloaded and any "corners cut" is to get what is needed in place, and not "lazy".
If you think the opposite, and that small business owners have ample time and are just lazy when they don't build everything from scratch, you should teach a course about how to manage a small business.
I agree, I think my comment was for the parent post.
Sorry
TLDR there is no threat mentioned in the article
Someone else told her she can fix it with help of local comunity and if she doesn't fix it, they will publish facts about her AI usage.
Judging by logic of some commenters if journalist ask someone questions, give them time to reply to give them opportunity to present their views and later publish it without them not meeting the deadline is now considered a threat.
Btw. I am also sick of AI slop everywhere in magazines, ads, etc., so if I can choose with my wallet whether I spend my money in AI slop shop or shop not using AI, it's easy choice.
This is so weird. Small businesses like delis and pizza parlors and Chinese food joints have been using stock photography and pre-made advertisements for decades. That ageless “GYRO” poster, FFS. People have lost their absolute minds over this.
It’s disgusting and unhinged behavior to threaten and bully people about this. Who cares how a local cafe made their menu? I truly don’t understand what’s going through people’s minds who attack people like this.
It's not about ai anymore. This is the new culture war.
As shitty as this is, I'm glad that it's happening because things like this erode the shamers credibility.
There were plenty of histrionic COVID warriors that tried to ruin lives and businesses. I bet the venn diagram of those people is close to a circle.
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her response to the dm about finding some cheap artists says it all. i'm sure she didn't give her employees payment for making the posters in the past either.
Of course she paid them, it was just another task they did while on duty, like brewing coffee or taking out the trash. Surely you’re not expecting her to pay someone who is already on payroll and being paid for their time extra because they’re making posters?
if i'm expected to make coffee and art then it's perfectly reasonable to expect more money than if I'm merely expected to make coffee. whether that comes as part of base salary or as some contract-esque arrangement when art is required of me is the kind of detail we can figure out (or you can try to do it with AI and have a lot of people stop supporting you. your call.)
If making posters is outside of the scope of their normal job duties as it had previously been defined, then yes, absolutely I'd expect them to be paid extra.
Just because they're on payroll and being paid for their time doesn't mean you can instruct them to do anything you ask.
I assure you, a retail workers job description includes doing all sorts of things, many much less pleasant than making signs. I guarantee you the employee assigned to sign making was happy to be doing that over cleaning the bathroom.
And besides, this is the U.S. Unless you’re in a union, responding to legitimate, legal and business-related tasks from your employer (that don’t exceed your ability to accomplish, e.g. not lifting 100lbs or whatever) with “not in my job description” will get you canned.
True. I can’t speak from experience, but this seems like it might often fall within the scope of normal job duties, though.
Extra responsibilities = extra pay 100% of the time. Just because it doesn't happen in practice all the time doesn't make it right.
This is probably correct. But also par for the course. I bet there are coffee shops that give skill bonuses or something like that, but I'm betting most don't.
Most folks who do stuff like this just assume it's part of the job and carry on.
Ouch. Have a little compassion. It is not easy running a small business, even less so when you've got a baby FFS!
> "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 down my legs because I overflowed the pump."
Also, it's one thing to dislike AI to the point where it "kills the mood" (for you) when you see an AI-generated poster, so you stop visiting that particular coffee shop. It's something else entirely to threaten the business owner.
The thing about the customer always being right is, that becomes a big problem when the customer is an unhinged terminally online weirdo.
The actual saying is "The customer is always right in matters of taste."
It is misquoted on a criminally large scale.
The evidence seems to point to "in matters of taste" being a much later addition: https://www.snopes.com/articles/468815/customer-is-always-ri...
The customer is not always right: https://notalwaysright.com/newest/
Agreed.
A small business in my city made a poster using stick men and simple drawings(because of the topic at hand) and people loved it.
The problem is, they could have literally done nothing instead. They could have apologized to their customers that they've been so busy with their baby that they haven't been able to get a new chalkboard out. They could have left the old chalkboard out and explained politely to people that the new items aren't on it because whoever used to make them left. They could have written (with their hands) the prices and items in halfway-decent hand-writing in a large enough font, and it would have gotten the information across in a way that was perfectly serviceable.
Instead, they chose to exploit people and remove art from the world by using ChatGPT. So no, I don't have a ton of compassion.
To be fair, the “threat” was to post a story to Instagram, so perhaps “warning” is a fairer characterization of what happened.
I do have compassion for the business owner though - lots of mixed signals between people selling AI and the people having been sold AI now rejecting it.
If not even software engineers can keep up (we still see slop posted here regularly), how is a non-tech person supposed to know better. I try to be gentle and/or keep my mouth shut when it’s people who can’t be expected to know better.
>It's something else entirely to threaten the business owner.
Please enumerate the threat, as I've been unable to find anything that passes for a threat in the article.
Who cares? It's a coffee shop ffs. People really have their priorities straight.
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Something makes me doubt her "coffee" is a dark roast that only loosely fits in the parameters of espresso.
I don't get why do you link scummy keyboard warrior behavior with being unemployed? These are hard times and job loss has become a widespread issue affecting people for all kinds of reasons beyond their control. Using that as a way to insult someone just isn't fair.
he's still got a point i.e. never let the mob win.
Wait a minute. I thought when we didn't like liberals we scolded them for spending $5 on coffee at Starbucks. When did we switch to them being too poor to afford it?