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.<p>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:<p>- The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious;<p>- The information is presented in a haphazard way, with text randomly thrown all over the place;<p>- 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;<p>- 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.
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.<p>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 have some bad news for you:<p>• The pictures on cereal boxes aren't entirely real, either. They use school glue, not milk.<p>• Your burger has never looked like the one on the menu (see <i>Falling Down</i>)<p>• I've never eaten at a Chinese takeaway where the food looked like the light-up menu board, either.<p>How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?
It's not that it's fake. It's that it has a distinct style.<p>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."<p>It takes only a few weeks. I've been amazed with our mind's ability to move the goalpost.
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<p>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?<p>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<p>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.
AI art has made the experience meaningfully less enjoyable.
> <i>How has AI art made your food meaningfully less delicious?</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>somewhere</i> in there should be the actual food even if it's cold, sprayed with glycerin, and under studio lighting.<p>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?<p>Sign me up, I love it.<p>AI image of a pancake because the small business owner doesn’t have a Kellog’s budget?<p>Fuck that guy, I hope his business fails
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.
> <i>has food ever looked like the picture, though?</i><p>Yeah. Especially at Asian restaurants. (With predominantly Asian customers.)<p>If a menu has like clearly painted or drawn images, on the other hand, I weigh them on artistic merit versus anything descriptive.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>AI obviously has 0 realness to it. So it’s worse in every way.
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 <i>good</i>, whereas the AI art makes it looks like <i>slop</i> (literally and figuratively).<p>I also prefer the side case of <i>actual</i> photos of the food, which is common at delis and some more authentic Chinese restaurants; these are also being replaced quickly by AI.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> They gave her a day to "think about it."<p>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.
Do we know what said account is?<p>(If I were the coffee shop, I'd seriously weigh how much business versus hassle they're getting from being on Instagram.)
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.<p>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.<p>If they <i>really</i> 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 <i>Office Space</i>.
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.<p>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.
"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.
"Nice business you've got here, shame if something happened to it"
It's an implied threat, which you can infer from the presentation of the information. For example:<p>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.<p>vs<p>You really should listen to me. I'll give you a day to think it over before I take further action.<p>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.
Its implied the talk is to rally the troops not gather general opinion
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.
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’.<p>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.
I'm willing to bet most of these people don't even patronize her store because they are terminally online unemployed losers who can't afford more than freeze-dried Folgers.<p>Never let the mob win. They don't deserve her coffee, good riddance.<p>If you are sending threats to strangers on social media you are at minimum mentally ill, she has something to gain by losing them as customers.<p>Small businesses barely get by. Someone with work as transient as "artist" should know better.
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.
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
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".
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.<p>The headline makes it sound like people are phoning in bomb threats and violence, which doesn't seem to be happening at all.<p>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 <i>because</i> they use AI, so it can only hurt 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.<p>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.<p>I am really disturbed by language minimizes concrete actions taken to cause harm.<p>"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.<p>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.<p>If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
"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..."<p>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?<p>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.<p>If it were me, I would have called their bluff and ignored them.
Oh, please. You know what they're threatening: an internet mob. That's not just "talking".
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.
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 <i>also</i> 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".<p>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.<p>People take things very personally when their core livelihood and ability to support themselves are threatened.
>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<p>This has always been a thing.
Thats true. This story makes me think artists are spoiled and entitled little shits, which isn’t fair to all of them of cause.
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.
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?"<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>The theory was that piracy might actually <i>increase</i> sales due to more exposure of the music to consumers.<p>AI generated art, AI generated anything really, is very close to piracy, but nobody is making that argument anymore.<p>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.<p>So it’s never really been about right and wrong, it’s just about who benefits. Like everything I guess.
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.
"Endeladyze", "Endelaydsze". Painful to read this poor kartveli gogo's gvari being butchered like that. Get a proof-reader, people.
> 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<p>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.<p>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.
ya it's cheap sympathy-raising and should be condemned
Im shocked she spent so much to get it printed. The design looks so cheap
The relevant question is how much comments on Instagram actually translate to changes in sales.<p>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.
"AI-generated" looks bad to a large minority of people. It is not clear if the majority notices, much less cares.<p>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.<p>And here it is: <a href="https://imgur.com/6C3zWcD" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/6C3zWcD</a><p>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.)
I have no problem with coffee shops intentionally using AI, that said...<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
As a society we need to start seriously planning on how to ban AI in art.<p>- I don’t want to listen music with AI generated vocals or tunes.<p>- I don’t want to watch TV shows or movies with AI generated scripts.<p>- I don’t want to read novels with AI generated text<p>- I don’t want to see animations with any amount of AI in it.<p>- I don’t want to play video games made by any amount of AI. (No FCKIN Blender models made with AI)<p>- I don’t want any amount of my digital art or posters to be touched by AI.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
<a href="https://archive.is/GSXl6" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/GSXl6</a>
The follow up instagram post, so the one after she showed off her awful looking sign:<p><pre><code> > 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.
</code></pre>
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.)<p><pre><code> - 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
</code></pre>
Bam, perfect, hit everything a PR firm would tell you to say to make this go away as quickly as possible...<p>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".<p>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.<p>Everyone in this story is tiring and annoying.
The reaction folks had is OTT, but it does look like AI slop.<p>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?<p>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.<p>But really I don't think it falls neatly into either of those categories.
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.<p>The owner had to resort to her standby Canva when the employee left, but lacking time due to a newborn.<p>To me, having followed all kinds of embedded links over to Vermont and Germany, the latter example being extraordinarily unappetizing. [0]<p>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.<p>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?<p>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).<p>Increasing costs affect not only businesses, but people needing work, some of whom have lost jobs and income, are understandably upset.<p>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?)<p>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.<p>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.<p>You can't have it all, or damn cheap. You must choose wisely.<p>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.<p>My two cents, or "Sixbucks" worth.<p>[0] <a href="https://x02.me/i/F7ZX6.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https://x02.me/i/F7ZX6.jpeg</a>
> 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?<p>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.
> "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."<p>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?<p>The article says she paid $150 for printing and $200 for a stand. Why not throw another $200 towards an artist?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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
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.
Live by the slop, die by the slop.
Reading headlines with this increasingly common format makes me irrationally angry.
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'<p>This primarily, for me, has resulted in me ignoring a lot of long winded tickets.<p>the user a generate's email/documentation/whatever via claude > sent to user b > user b uses claude to summarize it ... loop is shitty.<p>This applies less to me for code as long as you are reviewing it throughly and 'sculpting' it throughly to make it readable/maintainable.<p>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'<p>The issue comes when you (or someone, not <i>you</i> personally) dig way to deep into what "it" is, there is <i>always</i> 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.<p>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).<p>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?<p>Your point <i>as it applies to something that takes a sufficient portion of your time</i> 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).
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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?
Extra responsibilities = extra pay 100% of the time. Just because it doesn't happen in practice all the time doesn't make it right.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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!<p>> "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."<p>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."<p>It is misquoted on a criminally large scale.
The customer is not always right: <a href="https://notalwaysright.com/newest/" rel="nofollow">https://notalwaysright.com/newest/</a>
Agreed.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Heard this morning on NPR show:
The 3 areas were AI fails from the get-go.<p>Creativity<p>Taste<p>Judgement