AIBU to wish cafés and restaurants would stop using AI designed menus?

[fidsk]

Wish cafes, bars and restaurants would ditch the AI generated menus, posters etc. They look samey - can’t differentiate between them as use the same font etc.

Plus the food looks disgusting. I remember seeing on SM a poster for burritos. It looked like bone cancer.

Please could these places go back to pre AI generated shit

I've been looking for Christmas party/meal menus and wondering why they all look the same. Didn't realise it was AI. That makes sense now. I'm not a snob, but they did look quite down market and put me off.

I get both sides of this, hate the posters but do understand cost can be prohibitive.
but programs like canva are so easy to use. So many templates so it is worth the investment if someone does want to design posts etc

Way too many businesses are relying far too heavily on AI to promote themselves and it puts me off using them altogether.

I've seen cleaning businesses on local pages advertising and the images they share are clearly AI. It just makes me think they're scammers - even though I'm pretty sure they aren't.

But a lot of the time you don't need fancy designer skills.
I have seen dozens of posters this summer advertising car boot sales/summer markets/jumble sales etc.
The AI ones always have too much information and silly little illustrations of fake people smiling at a market stalls that is nothing like what the event actually is.
You don't need that.
You need -
Event
Date of event
Time of event
Place
You could get a ten year old to draw one up with felt tip pens.
Menus or lists for restaurants/butchers etc just need a list of the products and the prices.
You don't need all the fake imagery.

Yes they are everywhere. All look exactly the same.

Yet so many businesses managed to create their own posters and leaflets perfectly fine before the AI slop trend took over.

Also if you’re adding pictures of food that you haven’t cooked yourself or isn’t an exact representation of what you’re providing as a product then surely there’s an ethical question that needs to be asked.

Nonsense.

It takes very little skill or time to knock something up in Canva. At least in Canva you can personalise the colours and text so it doesn't look the same as every other flyer. And you can use real photos that don't make make people/food etc look like something from a sci-fi film.

It's not our job as consumers to help businesses with their marketing and it's our right as consumers to choose not to give our money to businesses marketing themselves using shitty A.I flyers.

I wouldn't have such a problem with using A.I for design purposes if real photos were used and if the designs didn't all look the same, garish and cartoony. It looks cheap and unprofessional and puts me off.

It’s not just cafes and restaurants - I keep seeing AI generated ads for craft kits, and they are so inaccurate - there is no way you can create the end result they show with the supplies and method shown.

A prompt I've been given by someone who uses AI much more effectively than me is 225 words long for the description of one thing, and they use a reference photo.

I say the same about book covers. Every book in the shop has the same strange style… I miss illustrators.

I've noticed it in new knitting patterns, too- just no way the end result could come from the pattern given. So I stick to vintage patterns.

I work in the public sector in a government hub building, and the management of the building are always using AI posters to advertise building events like coffee mornings, charity things, lunchtime talks. It looks dreadful - there was one for a food bank appeal and the cans and boxes on the posters had gibberish on them. I'm instantly put off when I see them, thinking this is cheap lazy AI slop. We've got a Macmillan coffee morning one up at the moment, and who needs AI to generate images of cake and biscuits? There's about thirty million rights-free stock images you could use, or even clipart would be better in my opinion. And don't Macmillan have posters and templates on their website we could use? It's so silly.

I think a lot of posters on this thread seriously underestimate the amount of labour it takes to successfully run a small, independent cafe/restaurant.

I work in one. The owners/operators work 90 hours per week, purely on prep, cooking, serving, cleaning, stocking up, keeping the books and abiding by legal obligations.

It is hard for them to find time to do anything other than what is vital in that moment. Their energy, effort and attention are constantly in demand from all directions.

They did have a professionally graphic-designed marketing campaign for a few years, but can no longer afford it due to rising energy and labour costs, etc.

Now they incorporate their own photos and logos into new AI generated content, so that their promotional materials remain fresh and updated.

They find the speed and ease of using AI invaluable. If they didn't utilise AI, the business would simply go without those benefits. I guess it's easy to denigrate if you don't comprehend the full context.

I saw one of these the other day. There were 8 different foods pictured, a reasonable variety and yet they all came out the exact shade of muted orange. It gave me the creeps in a real uncanny valley way.

Costs are being stretched so if it helps them keep afloat I’m all for it.

No, I do get it, we all know the WHY. It's way cheaper.

But that doesn't stop people thinking the food looks horrible and taking their cash elsewhere.

Our food doesn't look horrible cos we make our meals fresh from scratch and photograph the plates ourselves and incorporate the pictures into AI generated content. Maybe more businesses should do it that way.

But I do take your wider point re AI - and it is a valid one. I guess I'm just very loyal to my lovely bosses and workplace!

Whatever happened to other options such as getting a family member or an art student to design something?

Agree! Everything looks the same - car mechanics, SlimmingWorld consultants, restaurants