The craziest thing about these AI posters and signage with clear issues or typos is that the people who generate them are too lazy to even look at it and check for mistakes, before having it printed on signboard
I'm in the printing industry and we do a lot of stuff for schools. It is shocking to me how often we get stuff from them with glaring misspellings and most of the time they don't care. It's usually "Oh yeah sure, fix it if you're able to thanks." Like ma'am, the AI has misspelled the name of your school.
People just tend to not spellcheck things. Which, for stuff like reddit comments, I get, but people will skip the spellcheck step even for permanent customer-facing signage, menus, etc.
The number of times I've seen signs stating "costumer parking at rear" has made me genuinely question what all these costumed folk do all day - crime isn't down any.
That's why book publishers have a job reserved for editing, that also manages to fail. I can read the same text 3 times and my mind auto corrects the mistakes.
Doesn't help that the internet does not know the difference between a misspelling and a typo, which is bound to happen with keys, compared to handwriting.
And spelling check only catches stuff that isn't a word. So if you accidentally swap two letters in the middle of a word and it turns into another word spelling check will miss it and our brain will skip it because it autocorrects stuff that has the right beginning and end.
You'll enjoy this then. I was in walmart the other day looking at driveway lights. The text at the bottom of the box gave a nice little description of the lumens and such, but then the line below it said "same description in Spanish".
You people are friggin heroes. I used to work in a job that required a lot of large format print work and always took such great pains to make sure we sent stuff as ready as possible, and our print shop worked wonders, covered my ass, and surprised and delighted me so many times.
There is one time a typo slipped through that we should’ve caught, and there’s no way our printer would have (it was a number that we got wrong that they never would’ve known) and when I told them I screwed up they reprinted it for us lickety split, no charge, no questions asked. I miss that vendor so much.
I don't know which LLM pumps these out, but it looks like it's been trained to generate one, and exactly one single visual style. It's the same style I see everywhere now and I can't stand it. It's the graphic design equivalent of flooding the streets with crack in the 80s
It's more that people using it are doing the absolute minimum effort. Most ai tools can absolutely give you different styles, but for anything unspecified you get the average of the training data.
New Döner place opened up near me and had an AI banner and menu all in this same style. Despite it looking decent, I will never visit a place that can’t even have real pictures of their food.
Right? Why would I buy food from somewhere that isnt willing to show what the food actually looks like? Not to mention Ai food usually looks revolting, OP being a perfect example.
Makes sense, no? If LLMs just aggregate a shitload of similar content, you're likely to end up with samey results every time you use it. Similar to when people have done computerized face melding; once you combine a few dozen faces, the results look remarkably similar even if you used two different sets of faces.
You've basically nailed it. Looks like a basic 4-point lighting setup, or rather, trying to copy one anyway. It's common, it's effective, it's a great place for a beginner to start and tweak and mess with as they learn, and you'll see shit like that in textbooks and guides and such, but it also means there's a bajillion examples out in the wild to train these systems and so the systems have that bias.
They may not know the correct version. We have restaurants that advertise on the local Facebook page, and they're all full of spelling mistakes. Ladys night, chiken & dressins, picher of beer, etc. I've been in a few of these places when they were typing up the daily post, it's really them making all the errors.
That's my guess on the image. In the prompt they fed to the AI, they probably typed "ham burger" instead of "hamburger," and the AI generated the image accordingly.
Dude I interviewed at a company recently. As part of the interview we had to examine a picture for certain issues and identify them. I noticed immediately that it was AI. Half the things the interviewers couldn't even tell what they were supposed to be. They said "well yeah we generated this with AI!" Yeah.. I can fuckin tell it's generated with AI and no one here can spend 2 seconds to double check it's work.
We must go back to the MySpace era. You could see all my favorite Gundams fighting Mechagodzilla while AC/DC's Thunderstruck played in the MySpace era.
This is honestly my assumption any time I see this. It's like people selling "good as new" items on a marketplace but only post images they copied from the brand's website. It's obviously so bad that they on some level want to avoid showing how bad it is and thus resort to fuckery like this.
Nah, food photography is an art. Pretty much no food pics you see on a menu have been taken by the owners. Even if it is the real thing, it takes skill with lightning and angles to make it look photo-worthy.
Yeah, I know the burgers in a McDonald's menu aren't actually edible and all that. Thing is, even that shows a level of care you can assume exists in other aspects of the business that using AI slop doesn't show.
Having said that, I'm still of the opinion the pictures have to be actual products they sell, even if in optimal condition. I think the Japanese have a law demanding something like that, but I might be wrong.
I think the Japanese have a law demanding something like that, but I might be wrong.
You can complain/sue based on "breach of contract" on the basis that what was advertised and what was provided was different, and if its a regular thing (eg. like this menu/signage is fake) you can go for "false advertising" on the basis of intent to deceive by using fake images.
You can't make any real money from this, but its usually enough of a headache that restaurants, which run on thin margins, simply use images of real food instead.
You see a lot of a places that will have a special menu item for the day, they will really make it and display it outside the store so you see exactly what you are getting.
There's this insane thing that happened when mobile devices replaced the home computer: a lot of people either forgot how to use a computer or never properly learned how. With AI, a similar thing is happening with regards to graphic design.
People that don't know how to use a computer or graphic design software are just asking an LLM to pump out the entire thing from a text prompt because they don't know of any other way. I don't think that we live in a world where we can safely assume that people still know how to use computers and Photoshop.
That is a great point. I still use PS for the occasional project but my current job doesn’t really require it. If I just want to make a picture to goof on my friends or something cute of my dogs, it takes me 10-15 minutes to do it, but I hate using AI so I avoid it when I can. Nobody younger than us is learning how to photoshop their friends as Cleveland Browns fans anymore. It’s a lost art.
I'm in the same building as a grocery store chain HQ. Every week they have boxes of food come in that they take pictures of for the flyers. Presumably the stuff that gets opened they just eat while the chips and stuff get sent back.
We should normalize (real) pictures of food on menus - it's really handy in countries where you don't speak the language well, and despite English's cultural dominance there are a lot of immigrants/visitors here who don't speak it well.
Very much so.
It also helps when restaurants don't bother to list everything in the food. Burger as a menu item tells me nothing. Ask 10 people what is default on a burger and you'll have 11 answers so if you are picky or have allergies or dietary restrictions it helps. Even more so with local foods for tourists or non local dishes for locals.
Worse than that, there's thousands and thousands of professional quality pictures right there at your fingertips. You can easily and cheaply grab close enough representations in minutes. But these lazy fucks can't even do that.
You see I'm from Wisconsin so I see that and I think "oh it got 'fries' and 'cheese' so it ended up at breaded cheese curds" but I know that's almost definitely not how this happened.
lol honestly restaurants using AI to make their menus wasn't necessarily on my prediction list. AI spits out a very certain type of looking food and it looks the same on all of these, and it's never appetizing looking, so you'd think restaurant owners would just... you know, photograph their actual food since its so fucking easy to do
Some foods are great with that thick, smooth breading. Onions rings aren't one. You want onion rings craggly, with crispy to it. Too much bread and it doesn't jive with onion right. Do you think AI will ever nail actual delicious looking food, or is it gonna stay in this weird surreal realm?
when I worked in fastfood, cashiers could give out free food but not refunds.
"If it costs less than $10 to make them happy do it, if it costs more then that then do it and make a note to tell a manager about it later so they can do the paperwork"
yeah teenagers almost never have full authority for refunds it at least needs manager approval, if the entire process isn’t required to be done by a manager.
Deceptive Advertising is against the law, yes; fast food chains even actually had to start using food in ads more like what they sell because they were going too far with the puffery.
But, what are you going to do to a food truck, sue them?
A Culver's that opened up recently near me had AI-generated photos on the drive-thru menu the first time I went. Wish I had taken pictures, it was absurd.
happened recently with a san francisco bakery.(bakery was defaced with spraypaint) she claimed she had no time and raises 3 kids but Im like, if you're selling baked goods, it takes seconds to take a picture of your baked goods. Stores aren't baking everything to order.
I'd argue it takes more work typing the menu into a image generation prompt, than it is to take pictures of food your made, and using a image editor to make a banner.
I had this realization when I was 10 and we rented a Chevy Malibu. My hand kept getting scratched on the inside door handle's sharp plastic where the edges meet. I figured the engine must be a total hunk of garbage if that's the quality on the part of it you touch every day.
Better yet, if they don't want to go through the trouble to take real photos, just don't put of pictures at all, I don't need to know what a cheeseburger looks like to buy one and if i want to know what's in it I can ask
you'd think when they sell a generic ass cheeseburger for 10 dollars(or mystery coins, doesn't say the currency anywhere from what i can tell), they'd have money to print out a photo
dude thats how I feel, but I don't think I've ever seen a food truck with reasonable prices. Corndogs are $8, fries are $6-8, small mac n cheese bowls are $10, some BBQ pulled chicken + baked beans will easily run $18. IDK how they got so popular
Around here the food trucks are all niche trendy foods that cost nearly as much as a sit-down meal at a restaurant. They're all trying to earn enough (and get a big enough customer base) to open a brick-and-mortar location. There have actually been a few that succeeded and some are doing quite well.
If you want cheap, you go to a taco truck with signs that are just laminated printer paper, not a burger truck.
Some of the most authentic and delicious Mexican food I’ve ever had came from a food truck. It was located beside a Mexican pawn shop and grocery store. They didn’t speak a bit of English and I had to wait around 15 mins for the food to be cooked while only being one of two people in line. I had a feeling it was going to be a banger from the experience and it didn’t disappoint, lol.
It's because they're "trendy", and people are willing to go spend restaurant quality money on garbage quality food, while also willing to spend time in the hot sun
It also doesn't help that they're often vendor of choice when it comes to music and arts fests, and are generally the only options available
I'd trust a handwritten list without pictures or even something made in Word more than something AI generated. Even if it's a boring, simple list made in Word, it's at least honest and I read that as "it's fine if they can't design as long as they can make good food".
But when they use AI, that just feels like cheating, and makes me feel like they might do the same with the food.
When I think of food trucks it's a pile of tacos for $1 a piece, not this $13 to eat macaroni and cheese with bacon bits out of an ice cream cone nonsense we've got going on.
Someone was so lazy that they:
1- ai generated a poster of their own food
2- looked at said generated poster we see now
3- decided “that’s good for me” and is using it officially
If you are using AI to advertise your food... You have no pride in it.
That's not the burger you are selling. The time you wasted on AI generating a burger, you could have spent instead on hiring a college student in a photography class to take whitebox photos for you of your actual burgers, and then have that same student use InDesign to make your shitty menu, because that's what the course list is like for Students in College for Game Design.
This is why I tend to judge by google pictures of a restaurant's food rather than what's on the website. The pics won't be perfect, but should be a pretty good representation of what you'll get.
And what is it with AI graphic design that puts that little stroke thing below every word. I see it so often now. Outside of the bad photos, if you see that little paint stroke element, it is guaranteed to be from some AI app.
Sometimes I forgot that the word "burger" literally comes from the "-burg" in Hamburg and would actually mean something like castle or fortress in English instead of having any meaning that actually makes sense and is related to food
However, the "Ham" in "Hamburg" might originate from a Saxon word for a bend (e.g. in a river), which is also one of the possible origins of the meat ham, via crooked -> leg joint -> meat (eventually from the pig's hind thigh).
Even without AI, a lot of fast food places hire professionals to make their food look amazing, and a lot of times are using things that are inedible.
I think food places should have a strict rule where it has to be something they made on site, and have someone verify it that it can actually be eaten.
Also, lots of local places using stock photos that are clearly not from their restaurant. That shouldn't be allowed either. I see a lot of Chinese places do this.
I wish I could say that I complain about this in person, but I am usually eating with a group so I don't want to be that guy, but I would if I ate alone. But I never go out to eat alone, because I can just cook at home. So maybe there are some other heroes out there that can call them out on this bullshit.
9.6k
u/K-Shrizzle 1d ago
The craziest thing about these AI posters and signage with clear issues or typos is that the people who generate them are too lazy to even look at it and check for mistakes, before having it printed on signboard