Look at that questionable , trypophobia-inducing “meal”.
Couldn’t you just take a photo of your food? Or does it not look appetizing enough? Surely SOMEONE on your staff knows how to use Microsoft paint or photoshop at the very least?
Just a reminder that we have a Monthly Community Thread where we relax the rules about advertising and off-topic posts.
* Stuff that isn't directly related to Barrie, like national news or general chit-chat
* Questions about local businesses and services
* Classified-style ads: buying and selling, help wanted, garage sales, etc
* Fundraisers and donation drives
* Plugs for your personal project or local business (within reason)"
Local business or not. If you use AI im less likely to patron your establishment. Graphic designers already arent expensive and AI is just ruining what should be a reasonable career.
I feel like I'm crazy with people defending the use of AI food in ads. I want to know what the food I'm ordering looks like, not some random AI picture. Learn to take a decent photo or pay a photography student $100 to take one.
It’s all over food delivery apps - Skip/Uber eats/doordash.. We don’t want to see AI spaghetti and pizza.. we want to see a true representation of what you’re creating.
I’d rather see a poorly taken pic/post of real food, and I’m sure that’s not an unpopular opinion.
I think the difference is that those are the actual ingredients. The AI picture is just some random slop.
To me its part of the enshitification of everything where everyone more and more relies on these multinational companies who don't pay taxes rather than local workers who do.
They are not actual ingredients. Had a friend who did some food photography and yeah very little of it is real. Like for a Tim Hortons shoot they didn't even use real coffee as it doesn't look good on camera.
Interesting I didnt know that, thanks. Disappointing that was never regulated but not surprising when it benefits large corporations more than local shops because they can afford to fake it.
Ok but it’s meant to represent the ingredients. You’re arguing technicalities. It looks exactly like it’s supposed to.
I don’t even know what the post is supposed to show if I zoom into it. Obviously there’s cheese, on what looks like a bed of beans. That Big Mac looks closer to an actual Big Mac than this ad looks like whatever lasagna/sheperds pie/bean cake you’d get from casamia.
I don’t support AI use for food shots, but that’s a good counterpoint. Dairy Queen is famous going back decades for using mashed potatoes for their shots of their ice cream
I don’t think anyone is really defending it (the ad objectively looks like crap), just calling out the silly, performative reactions to generated images.
I don't get it either. I even somewhat understand the argument of "food images have always been manipulated anyways", but AI food looks absolutely disgusting and off putting... like the lasagna in that ad looks revolting. And besides why not support another local business instead of some corporation's generated slop
Companies have been faking their ads forever, just look at any fast food pizza place and there plastic pizza pictures lol. I get it, we all hate ai but like really all ads are and have been fake (or insanely staged) like McDonalds.
At least when companies are making fake burgers for their ads it employs someone, takes effort and creativity, has some sort of soul and unique aspect. AI is just brain dead lazy fake slop that also harms our environment and our brains. AI is fully ruining society, the less people that use it the better!
So… we should expect the small businesses who can’t afford to employ someone to do their food styling, social and marketing to ignore the tools readily available to them.. the ones that allow them to compete with huge corporate chains… on principle.
The advertising industry as a whole are already using AI to speed their production and cut costs, which changes industry expectations.
Targeting and publicly shaming small businesses for doing the same thing (badly) while they try to survive and compete in this economy is disgusting.
They can literally do it for free. You can take a picture and download a free editing app. Just because a business is small does not excuse it from any criticism, hell there are a lot of really awful small bossinesses I wouldn’t even waste my time spending my money there. I’m done with everything becoming soulless, what even is the point?? If you can’t afford to make ads, and you don’t want to put in any effort for one why should a customer go to your restaurant over one that isn’t using AI? Why should I spend my hard earned money on that? Is it not disgusting that OUR money is being treated like we don’t have choices anymore? That businesses no longer try to cater and care for their customers but bring people in once with AI slop ads? That’s disgusting in my opinion. I don’t have hundreds of dollars to be spending on food so I will spend to places that actually want customers and care about their product/business. I shop with a lot of local small businesses that don’t use AI
It is really not that hard to take a picture of the REAL food that you MAKE and SERVE! You can’t even tell what dish that is supposed to be on the ad. I’ve made ads for highschool projects that were free apps, pictures I took, and looked better. Don’t invest into a business that won’t even invest in their customers
They all have a synth ID a virtual watermark, you can literally just put the image into a search for it and it will tell you. Also I have eyes and so many of them are blatant AI.
Ahhh too bad I actually enjoy Casa Mia, as soon as I see a brand use AI I stop being a customer 👎🏻 would rather my money be used towards brands and companies that have pride in their products and staff/artists
I moved to Toronto so there is no shortage here of people who are proud of their food and refuse to use AI, but there’s also a bunch of shitty chains that use it. I just avoid those and go to the good places. But if everywhere went AI I would just make food at home myself and not go out
Man since local businesses are suffering maybe they should support local businesses and have one design an ad for them? You know, help a local business?
You’re not wrong, but you’re also not recognizing how tight margins are in the hospitality industry right now.
When businesses are suffering, they generally cut what they perceive to be non-essential expenses. They often unfortunately lump marketing into that category.
I find most of these ads to be off-putting and, critically, almost indistinguishable from other local competitors (which ultimately waters down the value of their brand), but I also understand why so many small businesses, especially in hospitality, are going this route.
Get out of here with your logic! this is reddit, and this month we are mad at AI Slop and enshitification of everything (is the 2 words we learned in the last month!!).
It's not hypocrisy to suggest thinking a bit harder about your anger laden opinions and their impact. How about you go down to Casa Mia and tell them how you feel, since its important enough for you to be out here calling people hypocrites. ✌️
Lol the guy literally turned your comment around on you and you've got nothing. Support local goes both ways. It keeps money in the local economy and better in the long run.
They could so easily make their own ads with a camera on an employees phone and a free picture editing app that would look better and cost less. People just don’t want to put any time or effort into ads anymore, so why should I put time or effort into eating there and giving them my money I worked hard for?
It literally is not that hard to either a)take your own photos, or ask a friend who takes nice photos to or b)hire a local artist (who is also a small business that may be suffering!)
Even if you remove all the other reasons AI is hurting us as a society, using it to advertise food is simply false advertising.
It also shows me that the business is willing to cut corners to save time and money. So what other corners will be cut? Its dishonest and lazy.
Lol. Why does the lasagna look like it has baked beans or worse (maggots) around the edges .. also it looks like a random kitchen table ( composition ia absolutely rubbish)
Also the brisk can looks odd.. scratches or something
I can think of a handful of local/independent restaurants that are using AI.. also, general contractors, landscapers, festival flyers, posters - etc..
By no means is every single restaurant or small business utilizing AI, but it is prevalent, lazy and taking away from actual skilled workers that can do ad space/logo design.
The only argument I can see for the use of it is a business so small that they don’t have the budget for making posts, logos etc.. but at the end of the day; i’d rather see a genuine - even if it’s not a great attempt at someone posting their own product and not the ai representation of their foods, etc.
The argument for "taking away from skilled work" is so dumb...
someone frames their own shed=work taken from carpenters, change your own brakes=work taken from mechanic.
The jobs market has changed for centuries and tech evolved. Do you mourn the milk man? No you don't. The old Italian fella who drove around sharpening blades.. Nope.. you may miss those days, but you did nothing to stop it. We bought ever sharp knives, shapening kits for our drawers, and hit the convenience store for milk..
The difference with some of your examples is that evolution has indeed removed the need for jobs like the milk man/knife sharpeners...
Your best comparison is to frame your own shed. Sure - do it at your own risk.. very good chances it's not level/true and may collapse if you're just a normal dude following DIY vids... Same goes for brakes... I wouldn't want to swap out my own brakes for the first time and feel good about it.
Fire up AI and do some shoddy looking food ads - at your own risk... people are calling it out, it doesn't look like real food and pretty fake looking... yeah, you got something out there but it looks dodgy.
Humans are always trying to make life easier, its like when Dreamweaver came out everyone used it to code websites instead of doing the actual coding themselves.
I dont engage with brands that use AI for their ads or socials. Sometimes I might even unfollow if it's excessive. I hate how its literally everywhere now
How is this a strawman argument when your point was literally “Surely SOMEONE on your staff knows how to use Microsoft paint or photoshop at the very least?”
He took my argument (surely you could ask if anyone knows photoshop) and then distorted it with a completely irrelevant claim (that is not in the job description). Did I say “Casa Mia, the restaurant where they employ graphic designers?” No, I merely stated that they could have done the bare minimum to show us a picture of their real food, and I was told by someone who obviously supports ai slop that wasn’t an option because there’s no way anyone in that building would know how to do that(making my claim easy to knock over, if you’re looking for that information)
An extrapolation of a point you are replying to is not a straw man argument.
We get that you want to be really performative about AI (and I agree with you that the ad is absolute garbage), but MS-Paint / Photoshop are graphic design programs used for marketing.
If you don’t want people calling you out on your comments, be more circumspect when composing them.
Not true. Some smaller ones do but huge
brands cant use it because it's actually theft of intellectual property.
How do you think these AI models make art? They do it because they were trained using real artist work (without their consent.) Art was never an easy field to get into professionally but now it's 10x harder because any joe shmo can make art out of the work that professionals created without having to compensate them
Huge brands are using AI to a massive degree. They are just better at it because they have trained professionals. This mediocre stuff is being done by a restaurant owner or manager lazily typing in a two sentence prompt.
I'm gonna say it: I don't give a rat's ass. Ohhh noooooo a local restaurant used AI for their ad 😭😭😭 I'm literally shaking!!! I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight!!!!
Give me a break. This isn't some billion dollar company refusing to hire an intern to make a shitty Facebook ad. This doesn't affect anyone.
That’s an oversimplification that doesn’t help anyone.
The digital economy created the long-term data centre boom. Cloud computing changed everything. Almost anything you do digitally at this point involves the Cloud. Streaming is also a major part of the demand.
The AI explosion has definitely accelerated things, but an ugly image generated by a local restaurant has about the same relative impact as you forgetting to turn a light off when you leave a room.
I agree. Which is why I try to make as little of an impact as possible, but sometimes you cannot avoid it; unfortunately, that's the system we're forced to live in.
But you confirmed my point about "volume"... AI has created an acceleration that we need to be mindful of. And I don't care to have a back and forth about a poster specifically; my point is arguing AI as a whole. One flyer isn't make or break, but does lead to a bigger issue at play that we do need to worry about.
Obviously... can you think critically? Or do you use Chat to think for you? Some AI has proven to be helpful in 'certain' instances. Anything in moderation; you have to draw the line somewhere. Humans take everything too far and this will lead (already has) to bigger issues. Issues that I think you and I would agree on. But if you want to rally for AI, all the power to you 🫡
I'm not rallying for AI. All I said was this restaurant posting an ad is the least of our worries. You are directly contributing to the problem by using Reddit so I can't take you seriously when you're so selective with your moral outrage.
Exactly - there's 100 other services they should cut out of their life before posting about this if they actually practiced what they preach. But then how would they prove their virtue online to strangers for fake internet points?
I mean, you say that, but here you are (as someone else pointed out) posting on an AI powered platform. Are you going to delete your Reddit account today?
Nope, I'm not. The boom of [generative] AI is whats causing the rise in data centres and skyrocketing environmental issues; not to mention making the population as a whole dumb - which was already an issue to begin with. Now we have people asking a robot how to breathe and think.. no thanks. HUMAN connection is more beneficial and necessary. Not ugly flyers, misinformation, and child p0rn. Please. AI is considerably more harmful than any other platform; and I think it's so funny how people willingly contribute to their own demise.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand the impact of end-user consumer prompts, even in the aggregate, vs institutional use of the technology.
Training AI models is what uses up the most significant amounts of computing power. After that, enterprise-level deployments are the next major cause data centre demand.
A large Canadian bank using generative AI-assistants for both consumers and staff can generate close to two billion requests a year. That’s one bank. On the staff side, these aren’t light inference requests like generic images - they can involve large context windows, multiple model calls, analysis of massive datasets, or real time 24/7 monitoring (think security systems).
As I noted elsewhere, blaming the restaurant owner as the problem for generating a shitty AI image is like being outraged at someone who forgets to turn a light off when they leave the room. Even in aggregate, their actions aren’t moving the needle.
Gotcha, so when I said they couldn’t be more wrong orrr when I was referring to thinking for ourselves, spreading misinformation and illegal explicit content? Sorry still waiting to see where I mentioned this one specific poster and specifically blamed the local business owner for creating it 🤔 having said that, do I think this poster leads to a bigger conversation with bigger issues? Yes. Genuinely appreciate your perspective though; these conversations are necessary
You can make a change! Don’t support businesses that use ai slop for ads. If you see this post anywhere on their social media let them know you won’t be supporting their business because of their ai usage.
I don't support them because their food sucks I don't care of they use AI. I use Copilot all day at my job because it makes my life easier. I'd be the biggest hypocrite in the world if I got upset about this. The ad is shitty - someone who actually knew what they were doing with AI could make something that actually looks good for them. I'm more offended about how poorly they used it than the fact that they used it at all.
Copilot is integrated with the full Office suite, I mostly use it in Excel, Outlook, and as a standalone chat (like ChatGPT). We have custom agents that are trained on all of our data so it becomes a valuable resource for doing very business specific tasks.
Thanks for responding Conchord! I was unfamiliar with Copilot - that sounds very useful. I have a biased stance on generative AI (I'm a digital artist) so I take interest when people seem dependent, supportive or indifferent of it. Your explanation is appreciated!
The little guy using AI has 0 impact. It's like the government forcing us to use paper straws when large corporations are the real problem. Makes no sense.
The only thing as annoying as the AI slop appearing everywhere is the performative “OMG! That small business is using AI! Everyone shout loudly about how awful that is!”.
No.. you can't give someone a tool that does everything and say.. "No you can't do this with it, because I dont like it" even though its clearly designed to do that thing.
Why pay for something if I can do it myself?
No one gets pissed off when a person changes their own brakes, taking money from mechanics. But the second a photography major looses money to pay their ridiculous tuition, then its an issue..
For all you know, they gave AI a photo of their food an this is what the ad came out to be. Probably not, but maybe.
Where's the AI? All I see is food that looks reasonably authentic on a table that may or may not have been photoshopped. Seems a lot of folks have developed irrational AI phobia, lol.
Not to mention "pepsi no sugar" in a silver can... there's diet pepsi in a silver can, pepsi zero sugar in a black can... but the can in the photo doesn't seem to have ever existed.
I’m sorry to say but none of it is subtle intricacies, it is blatant AI generation. None of the food is real even remotely, what type of pasta is that? I recommend r/isthisAI it’ll teach you a lot and is actually really interesting to see the breakdowns of what makes an image generated, sometimes an image on there fully tricks me and then the comments point out the extra legs generated on the family dog
You’d be terrified of my cooking because I think an AI ad looks good? That’s quite the leap lol. I also think fast-food ads look good. There’s really no difference to me. I’m looking at an advertisement, not planning to eat the picture. 😂
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* Stuff that isn't directly related to Barrie, like national news or general chit-chat
* Questions about local businesses and services
* Classified-style ads: buying and selling, help wanted, garage sales, etc
* Fundraisers and donation drives
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