Generated menu at a Mom&Pop restaurant made me physically ill

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.

I wonder if it's a visual acuity thing or.. I dunno... I cannot figure it out... but yeah there's a separation, boomers (not all but so fuckin many) cannot see it for some reason...

There are business owners who greenlight even this crapola thinking the generated content is good enough, or because they want to get into the AI bandwagon because it's so goddamn cheap to them, so that they don't have to pay a professional photographer, a layout artist and a printing press just for a set of menus. All they care about is the results, cut to the chase, and that's instant gratification.

What is Facebook like these days?

I'm curious. Why do you assume the restaurant owner must be older? What is the cause of "diffusion blindness" and how does it relate to a person's age? IOW considering that these AI images are relatively new, common and widespread in less than the last 10 years or so, they are of the same "newness" to most people, certainly to all adults.

So, above what age would a person be susceptible to "diffusion blindness", and why that particular age? Could it be related to the number of years lived before the rise of so many AI images? It seems to me that the more years lived before the influx of AI images, the weirder they would seem, so that the older a person, the more likely they would be to find the images bizarre and unnatural. Or do I have it backwards, and if so, please explain.

Maybe they just need to put on their glasses

Even better: order something and then throw a tantrum that it looks nothing like the picture.

MHMMM. SUSTINANCE. YUM YUM.

FOOD PORT ME BABY 🤖

ERROR: The sharp edges of the pokey mesh-lattice have damaged the inner lining of my food port.

The trouble with food that looks like that, you have to keep an eye on it. Whenever you look elsewhere there's a faint rustling noise, you catch a rapid movement in your peripheral vision and look back, only to see it has taken a different form. Chances are all the photos on the menu were actually the same dish. Is it alive? Is it sentient? Is it one organism or many? Such questions lose their meaning with food like this.

Oh and don't eat it because you won't be human any more

the biscuits and gravy looks like dog biscuits... they are little bones, or somewhat resemble then anyways.

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

Not that I'm on their side, but it can take a lot of prep and experience to take good food pics. Now having said that, often my favorite places have pictures that are decades old and faded, and probably weren't great pictures to begin with.

That's a bit harsh. A lot of the pictures you see on menus are not what they cooked in the kitchen. Because cooked food doesn't look sexy enough. Or only when it's hot and then steam coming off it makes it look worse in the image. So they use glue to gloss things up, replace entire ingredients (e.g. motor oil for maple syrup), etc. Food photography is serious business. And expensive.

That means making each dish at least once before opening the restaurant to the public and spending money on ingredients without having a customer pay for them. You’d think a restaurant would make each dish at least once in a trial run for family and friends or something anyway before opening, but it seems not. Otherwise, another option is opening with a temporary text-only menu and taking pictures as customers order each dish. Not sure they’re going to get that chance at this point with spider-web hashbrowns in the menu. Who wouldn’t get up an leave after seeing that?

That requires effort though, I want the computer to do it for me! The future is grim.

Its extremely unpleasant. Why not use pictures of the food they actually have in the building? Even clip art or stock images would have been better.

What do you have against short-order cook M.C. Escher's waffles?

Sounds great. How do you like your grid twigs prepared?

Oh hell yeah, fried 𝔾𝔼𝕆𝕄𝔼𝕋ℝ𝕐, my favourite!

Tell the owner's and then leave. They'll only get the message if they start losing money over it.

idk if that's normal in the US but it looks like a normal AI generated thingy to me. Like I've seen AI trying to tell you to be safe, consult real humans etc. quite a lot. So I assume that that's just part of it.
Then again we're talking about the country where lettuce isn't safe to eat so...

Yeah, it's very common on menus in the U.S. because we're a bunch of litigious assholes and weird legal disclaimers disclaimers are sprinkled around our country like magic spells to ward off the lawyers representing narcissists.

I have no idea if that little warning has ever actually been tested in court in a food-borne illness case to see if it works, though. Businesses can't always just waive customer safety liabilities away with finely-printed incantations.

Also, it doesn't make sense to have the asterisk on stuff like the biscuits and gravy, only items where the customer picks the "doneness" like eggs or steak. WTF wouldn't be fully cooked in biscuits and gravy? And if they're going to do this stupid shit, it should also be on the "country ham breakfast" that comes with "two eggs any style," since it's on all the other egg items.

It is standard for menus to have that asterisk next to food items whose doneness you get to choose. Mostly steaks and burgers.

While I consider that statement normal, It is never something that is attached to every menu item.

First source I found from a search https://doh.vi.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Consumer-Advisory-for-Menus.pdf

Edit, another source with better examples https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/health/food/operators/consumer-advisory I am sure I could probably find something from the USDA or FDA ,but I already put too much effort into this.

Litigation heavy society + Governmental food safety guidelines.

Every menu in the us that has options for even slightly pink burgers, eggs, ceviche, sushi, or anything else not cooked to federal food safety minimums has that disclaimer on the menu.

We all know it, there's no reason for it other than perceived cheap lawsuit protection.

Thing is, if the food was stored negligently that message won't stop them from being liable. And if the food was stored properly, the chances of contamination are pretty damned low.

Wait wtf?

Okay, I can see "runny yolk" as counting as undercooked, but a lot of those foods aren't things that should be runny.

I hope no human actually typed this crap and it's just something the AI decided to insert for reasons

If i remember correctly US has higher salmonella infection rates compared to the rest of the developed world

When cooking eggs sunny side up, I ALWAYS cook them with runny yolks. That's how you retain the flavour. Been doing that forever, never a problem. Not in the USA.

It's a legal disclaimer so they don't get sued

I noticed that too... that asterisk makes me feel pretty grossed out, and seems like such an ai addition to a menu.

Definitely not defending them here, but taking appetizing menu quality photos of food is surprisingly tricky.

What is tge second drink supposed to be. I sometimes really don't kbow if i see bad or if they just hallucinate somethi g that i don't understand. Tgese AI pictures feel like a weird dream where things appear to make sense, but they really don't

Old Neuralblender feel to it

Low quality AI images have always kinda reminded me of how stuff looks on psychedelics, and these pictures are an excellent example. They look like how food looks after a couple hits of DMT.

I live in a world where one pancake, 2 eggs and a few peices of bacon are $15. $15....

Lol that's still genuinely disturbing the more you look at those pictures. The bacon ripples are hilariously regular and the french toast looks like slices of alien skin. And check out the cucumbers and tomatoes in the salad.

That's really funny - I didn't notice that at the time.

Well it does also include grits or hash browns in the meal. So it could cost like $14.50 if you went with the most expensive options for meat choice and hash. But a worse deal if you get sausage

City ham is a slab of pink, what you might call a ham steak.

The alternative is Country ham, which is salt cured, and looks a bit like leather often with a round slice of the hambone.

Based on my experience at restaurants, anyway.

Sounds like you might enjoy a trip to Mystery Flesh Pit National Park!

Misrepresenting the thing you are selling should be illegal.

That's how grandma used to prepare them with love!

It is actually kind of hard to get great results for large scale advertising, but even a mediocre poorly lit real picture will be more appetizing on a mom and pop restaurant menu than this abomination.

You're exactly right but I hadn't noticed it.

I hate this even more now lol

Same, I spent like $200 on stuff and none of it to people with AI banners.

Same for my local Scottish Highland festival. I avoided supporting any vendor that used AI, but the festival itself used AI flyers in several spots. Super disappointing.

That’s a blast from the past. Back when image generation was a quirky little experiment, and people still had hope that this technology wasn’t going to wear our souls down into a fine dust.

It would be a kinda fun concept to do as a pop-up performance art thing

Yeah, the only things that can be eldritch abomination at Denny's and Waffle House are the customers and staff.

That’s just how it’s spelled in American English, unless I’m missing something.

I feel people care. Maybe not because they are AI generated, exactly. But how many Karens are going to get their unstitched pancakes and complain? The pictures are there to show you what you are getting, that's it. And where I understand that people stretch the concept of "pictures of the food" - if the image is greatly different than the product you get... people don't like that.

That's what I went in for, but I couldn't do it after seeing the menu.

My best guess is hash browns but idk they're wild looking

What, you don't like eating dried pine tree sticks with your caramel-and-marbles corncob patty?

If I had to guess, the outsourced the entire thing to a “gig” “design” platform like Fiverr. The work is done by people in impoverished nations who can’t afford anything that isn’t free, because the whole contract including iterations was probably $10-20.

I read somewhere that if your ask to do it step by step as you did the results are not so bad, but users are so lazy that they ask it to do the whole menu at the same time. Even lazier is to see that result and think it is good enough

These pictures are probably a few clacker generations old. Probably around the Will Smith spaghetti generation.

It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of why menu photos even exist.

It isn't to show people a generic representation of what bacon and eggs might look like. It's supposed to show what your bacon and eggs looks like you fucking dolts

Redditor illness aside, who thought that looks good, or even consumable? Usually the shit just looks weird but you have to look closely, ans it's not that big. This is front and center and looks like a gross close-up from a ren and stimpy bit

This makes it worse, because they have some actual photos of their food on there. So at some point they had pictures taken of their food, but they opted for the AI abominations instead. Gross.

Thanks!

I think that picture of the French toast (?) gave me trypophobia

My biggest problem with this is that it's a huge red flag that the business just doesn't give a shit and has no attention to detail. So where else are they cutting corners?

You're a restaurant, and you can't be bothered to just... take a picture of your actual food? That really makes me question whether the food is any good at all, or if they have any kind of adherence to food safety practices. Because I highly doubt that, from the type of person who would think this menu is OK.

our local california burrito advertised some of this nightmare fuel.

huge chain with a dozen+ locations in and out of CA, tons of good food, and they're shilling this garbage with pics that look infected at best.

aww man, we will suck the capitalists knag's, no matter the cost.

It's so american, you don't have to say anything more.

Also right now it's cheap to get them all hooked. The future will most likely be paid in tokens.