At a small restaurant in Tennessee, USA.
I don’t like that they asked an LLM to graphic design the entire menu, but why in the name of robot jesus did they look at the result and say “great. Love it. Print 100 copies.”
The food pictures made me physically ill. They’re really upsetting! I told the Waitress, who agreed that the pics were awful, and the manager/owner(?) who didn’t seem to care.
There are LLM inconsistencies all over, too, like icons changing from page to page.
I imagine many of them have vision so deteriorated that they literally can’t see the difference. And I will remind you, these people are still allowed to drive.
This is especially absurd in the context of it already being a restaurant. “How are we going to get pictures for the menu, boss?”
Gee, I dunno. Maybe just make the meal in question and take a fucking picture of it? You are running a restaurant, so I have to charitably assume that somebody there is capable of cooking whatever it is, and plating it up, and sticking it on the cleanest table in the joint for a couple of seconds. For being printed at 72 DPI and the size of a postage stamp anyway, using your cell phone to take the picture will be just fine.
Taking a good looking picture of food is not actually all that easy, professionals earn(ed) a lot of money doing it.
That said i 100% prefer a casual real picture over the promotional art in a menu. I want to see what i am getting and i mean prefer it over the professional photo. Ai food looks absolutely disgusting.
It’s so easy, honestly. This is fresh mackerel with a baked potato, patty pan squash, sugar snap peas, beet tops and courgette.
Yeah this “good pictures are hard” thing I keep hearing is nonsense to me. What the heck are people on about?
I guess this doesn’t look like a professional shot or something, but it’s plenty informative and doesn’t look Eldritch.
That single word somehow completely encapsulates how these pictures look: eldritch.
Or just have a menu without photos like most normal restaurants?
Ehhhh, a smartphone with a common “food” filter and a decent angle on the food does a fairly good job these days. The small sensor actually gives just the right amount of depth of field, whereas a big camera would have to stop down or focus stack anyway.
I agree with the sentiment though. Running a business is hard; they only have so much energy, so corners have to be cut, and they clearly tried to cut the media budget they’d need to stage every meal on the menu.
Considering they explicitly commented that photo quality isn’t important, how good professional photos of food are isn’t relevant.
Maybe i am blind but i dont think they explicitly said that.
I just know that “traditionally” food industry does not make pictures themselves they hire a professional artist for doing so. That was just normal bussines. So they where never in the habbit of doing it themselves.
While i never agreed with advertisment more fancy than the actual product. That is/was a career where people put real effort and artistic skill into. Its huge shame that its getting stolen by ai with literally 0 results.
I wonder what pictures this menu had before ai.
Depends on the ‘food industry’.
Big chains, sure, they have photographers come in.
The little chinese restauraunt near me, clearly they just snapped pictures of their food with smartphones and slapped them on the board. Their printed menu was just text. I suspect if this is a small restaurant, they probably just had text on menu, and thought AI could give them ‘big restaurant’ menu impression, but instead got horror show of crap. They probably could have provided some pictures and directed it to make a menu layout but do not generate images, but use these pictures.
Honestly, taking a good enough picture of food is pretty easy, except when you want to be misleading.
Tricks like knowing exactly what you are allowed and not allowed to substitute for ‘better looking’. For example knowing you can substitute something for milk when taking picture of cereal, because something with glue ‘looks nicer’. Or carefully arranging the ingredients so that while the burger is technically using the same ingredients as what you get, the ingredients are all to one side so it looks like more from the angle of the camera.
For casually accurate pictures of a small restaurant menu, just take pictures in average lighting and it will be fine.
Eh, that’s more cynical than what I mean. I’m not trying to insult older folks, not their health nor intelligence.
I was talking more about psycological ‘perception,’ assuming their vision is sharp, or they have reading glasses on or whatever. My observaton is their brain tends to operate more on ‘autopilot,’ even among remarkably smart older folks, so perhaps they’re more inclined to miss ‘uncanny valley’ things like this until someone points it out and they really focus on the picture’s details.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here. Like skimming while reading, you know what eggs look like. Also, if they took a bad pic, you’d skim like that too. Most menu’s pics don’t look like what you’re going to get regardless.
Most restaurants don’t even have a picture of the food, especially when the menu is really simple like this.
I mean honestly I’ve ordered plenty of food from text only menus and relied on ingredient descriptions to help me decide. I’m only disappointed when they give me something that is very against the platonic ideal of whatever they described. (I’m sorry but deep fried scones are a step too far away from egg battered bread for me to call it French toast)
Vision can be fine at certain sight distance and not fine at others. That may make them perfectly fine to drive but to miss fine details. This happens frequently with near and far sighted people.
I can’t see granular details anymore without glasses but that doesn’t affect my driving at all (granular details being font at sizes like 4 point). I used to be able to read it without problems, but as I have aged it’s not something I can do anymore.
Stock fotos. Cost a bit, but look great.