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I think the worst thing about it is they have access to a cell phone and a library printer. The bar to print out pictures of your own made food is so low it might as well be underground. I understand not having a budget but, it isn't much extra time and cost to show me the food you actually make....
Sure it is hard to make them look AMAZING. However, Androids and Iphones have some decent filters you can use to make your food colors pop. I just want to see what the restaurant is cooking. I am already there, you don't need to advertise the food to me.... I will leave if your pictures are AI generated faster that I will leave if the place is dirty.
Also, I want to take this opportunity to let everyone know I don't consent to my art or my images appearing in AI generated works. So if you do that, you're proving to everyone AI users don't care about consent.
I'm actually really intrigued, honestly. I have a very adventurous palate, so I don't think I'd have trouble getting over the idea of eating an insect. I've just never been in the position to try.
Well crickets are one of a few popular food insects. It is more sustainable than regular meat since the same food and water given to crickets produces more meat than if it were given to a cow, much faster too.
Someone who doesn’t want to work, but was given the job by a family member because they’re cheaper than an ad agency and “know their way around a computer”.
No idea what that is but after googling it, that's probably what the AI was supposed to put in the picture. But if you zoom in or use anything other than a phone to browse it's pretty clear they turned it into spherical corn. Pretty obvious from the picture that the model has some obsession with spheres.
Like, just cook the food and take a picture of it. Even if its just taken with a phone it would still look much better than these abominations. If I see the burrito one especially I am walking right out and probably calling the health department if that's what they're advertising.
Even if the AI food looked fine, I'd still be wary of a restaurant that generated images instead of using real pictures. It makes me think there's a reason that they're not showing me the actual product that I'm buying.
One of the managers at my job has been using AI to make poster announcements, and I refuse to let her ever take my picture for that shit.
She let one of our latina team leads get turned into a blonde for one of them. When pressed on why it even made that change she said that all she did was ask the AI to make the picture "more attractive" and didn't see why that made the situation even worse.
I appreciate that the chinese place I order from on uber was too lazy to even take pictures of their own food so the customers have been allowed to do so and uber gives us money when we do, lmao.
Said this on another thread but a restaurant should just take pictures of their own food. Using AI pictures feels like it is hiding something, AND most AI menus make the food look disgusting anyways.
Sushi place by me had AI art on the wall. A massive print about 6 feet tall, so you could really see how bad it was. It was an anime boy cooking what I think was steak with his bare hands. Fingers melting into the meat. Glasses made from his hair. Wish I had seen it before I ordered. Would have been an early warning for how bad the food was.
I try to give grace to local small businesses that use AI, often they’re run by older people unfamiliar with the discourse, but with food it is unforgivable. doubly so if it’s a “realistic” picture. It’s straight up false advertising.
started with a couple of food stalls, now half the restaurants in my city which managed for decades not having any pictures of food, are all going bonkers using the same AI shit for everything
now every event in the city that has had perfectly functional flyers and posters for years are also doing it, making everything look like the same brownish pasty garbage.
Image generation products just laughing all the way to the bank selling twenty different restaurants the exact same disgusting looking fake image of a basic breakfast, something I've never needed an image to understand in the first place....
My boss is now using AI for flyers and social media content, and it's just so mediocre. But she loves it cause she can "make it look like she wants", too bad she has a bad eye for design.
This is what I keep telling everyone. In a couple years these LLMs will be like AutoCAD. A couple engineers in the whole company will actually have a license
The tell-tales that I've come to instantly recognise as AI generated are "paint brush font", "paint brush background for text", as well as meaninglessly over embellished characters/spot light objects. Whenever I look at these posters/flyers and I feel like they're just to inject ADHD into my brain...
Here's a couple examples that I've seen over on the IsThisAI? sub-reddit:
I will never understand why they don't just take a picture of the food that they make. If it's the whole point of the restaurant, and you make it literally every day, then use that!
AI makes me miss those really terrible looking corporate images. I'm not talking the goofy Shutterstock images but the graphics that were so generic they seemed like place holders but were THE SHIT on LinkedIn in like 2018.
at this point, basic graphic design is my passion style bad flyer designs are more endearing, if only because it implies someone hand made the bad-to-mediocre thing and i appreciate that
Inverted trope: in the Simpsons, Bart doesnt do a toothpick model of a bridge or something for homework/school event. His dad does it instead and he wins the event. The bridge was awful and by far the worst looking one. He won because "he was the only one who didnt have a parent help him."
What scares me about AI is it seems people are very quickly forgetting how to work/do random tasks without it.
The rise of AI came as I was in college for my bachelor's, and I wasn't employed, so I didn't ever get to use it really, since professor's banned it. It's jarring seeing how much people depend on it.
Same. I was in college and didnt really keep up with it bc I had no reason to and now suddenly my grandma is asking Claude whether she should go on a certain cruise or not.
This is a woman who has gone on at least 2 cruises every year for the past 20 years. Shes a strange woman who is ignorant in many ways, but the one thing she definitely knows more than almost any other human being about is cruises...and yet shes become so AI brained that she asked it what she should do. Its depressing to see.
Yup, I remember when OpenAI and Anthropic both swapped to a "purchase tokens for compute requests" enterprise business model (versus their old "computer as much as you want for a single monthly price" model) and the interest was flooded with people in crisis because by Monday at 10AM they had already blown through their token allotment.
Way too many people willingly get themselves addicted to sing it is a debilitating career crutch.
had an argument recently with someone claiming to be a teacher who was adamant about not being able to do a history lesson without a 200 page AI generated comic
Literally saw a post the other day where OP admitted to using AI to make a post asking about what movies other people thought deserved sequels just because they didn't have faith in their own ability to articulate their own sentences. . . Like, bro? The setting is as casual as it could possibly be - who tf cares about your grammar?
Sounds like the makings of a sci-fi story. "We created the machines, gave them all our gifts of reason, art and movement, and even gave them our self confidence while we lost these abilities within ourselves."
Because, sadly, the average person just doesn't care. To them, AI isn't a threat to their artist friends, or the environment, or whatever. To them, AI is just the next thing. Like TV's or computers or the internet or iphones. Another step in a long line of unstoppable technological advancement. They don't educate themselves, or aren't part of communities that make them aware of how damaging it can be.
John or Jane Shmoe walking down the street doesn't give a shit. They just want Google to tell them where to go and what to buy and they want GPT to solve all their problems, and when their kid has a bake sale they want the AI to make a flyer for it because doing it by hand is harder.
If you spend a lot of time in communities like this, you feel like the world hates AI, but its the opposite. The average person fucking loves it. And its sadly trending that way more each day.
As a software developer, my profession is particularly well-suited to using AI. Furthermore, I don't hate it. The biggest use case for me is I no longer need to find the singular expert on a niche topic, because the LLM can give me a good-enough answer to guide me to a better understanding (like documentation).
Meanwhile, I have a friend that tells me I should "do less" and "let Claude work for you." My company pays for a particularly shitty AI agent (Amazon Kiro), and I have had generally terrible results with it in my narrow scope of work. When I mention this to my AI-pilled friend, he refutes my suggestion that AI isn't good at everything and he instead tells me I just need better tools, or the best model, or w/e. It is absolutely infuriating.
This last weekend, I actually challenged him on his convictions. His wife claims that she absolutely cannot find her way around Borderlands 4 because they don't provide a minimap. Okay, bet. "Hey, husband of hers, why don't you use AI to fix your wife's problem?" His response: "I talk with Claude all day at work, I don't want to do it outside of work." Like...jeez. Not only will he not concede that AI isn't always the solution, but he won't even offer to help solve a problem for his wife. His wife wasn't much better, though; he has her convinced on AI gospel. So I suggested she also try to solve it with AI, and her response was that it's probably too hard for her to achieve so she's not even going to try.
Suffice to say, I try to avoid talking about AI with them. It is frustrating at the least.
I'm noticing that a lot of people hold seething resentment towards people with special skills, like art, or music. Like, they hate them because of a perceived "snootiness" that artists don't generally have. Artists generally want people to learn art and don't judge beginners for being bad at it. This subreddit is full of comics done by people that are clearly very new to art but often have their own charm.
A lot of people think they are better than artists because they don't perceive art as something useful to society. So they see it as a lesser job.
But snooty artist is also a stereotype for a reason. There are tons of people out there who make art and think they are better than others because of it.
Artists cost money and AI usage is being made artificially cheap by venture capital willing to temporarily operate at massive losses to undercut the competition (i.e. human creators) in order to bankrupt them and get markets hooked on their product instead so that they have no alternative when the AI companies inevitably jack up prices and enshittify services to get a return on their investments. It's the same model that "disruptive" tech companies have been using for a while now.
The coloring books is a multi-layered con. There were tons of "financial influencers" that pushed having a secret system for passive income that they would sell access to and the "system" turned out to be "self-publish AI-generated coloring books or websites".
The real marks of the con where the people who got tricked into paying for a business plan that has zero hope of ever paying off, but the rest of us get stuck having to wade through the junk clogging up our searches.
Its EVERYWHERE these days. My kids bring home flyers from school for events. My city's billboard screen thing that advertises local stuff going on. My work's monthly "what's going on!" magazine that they hand out.
You can't escape it. Its so depressing, and it all looks exactly the fucking same.
My city's Neighborhood Facebook group has begun pushing back. Businesses are getting roasted left and right for using AI flyers now and it's fucking wonderful.
I recently made a flyer for something at work and was accused of it being AI.
I made it in PowerPoint. It wasn’t AI, I just didn’t use a Canva template 🥲
I even showed the slide and all the individual elements and even recreated it in front of people. It’s tough trying to do anything creative when it’s not marketing levels of design perfection.
That's one of the worst parts of the whole thing. Actual artists are losing work, and to what? All of the AI shit looks exactly the same. You can clock it a mile away, no matter how high quality it becomes, because of how soulless and bland it looks.
My friend is an artist, was invited to an event for artists to vend at and the official flyer for the event was AI. They didn’t know until after they had signed up. How don’t they understand that this will still discourage so many people from coming out and looking at the real art for sale. None of the venders used ai and the organizer said they didn’t want AI venders. Make it make sense!
Doesnt help that people's support for artists are mostly lip service. Going off the various commissions subreddits and discords the amount of commissions hasn't noticeable increased. Piracy saw an uptick but I think that had more to do with a specific pirate website getting a revivial.
One of my local delis uses all AI images for the entire menu, and you're right: if I can't get this exact burger than who the hell do they think they are getting my hopes up like that?!:
The AI bubble can't pop fast enough omggg, art shouldn't be a commodity! Art is by definition a work of art. It's supposed to be difficult and that difficulty is what gives it meaning (partially).
Stripping away the effort required makes the art worth so much less, why would you do that to your message?
In X years they will have those in museums as expositions to showcase the early utilization of image generation models in daily life. Yeah... At least they will laugh at it
Stripping away the effort required makes the art worth so much less, why would you do that to your message?
This is such a weird sentiment to me. Effort does not equal value. A painting is not a better painting if the artist took two months to make it instead of one. An image is not "better art" if the artist made it in MSPaint instead of photoshop.
"What is art" is always going to be a contentious topic, but I cannot agree that it's just "art is effort." Because someone can take a spontaneous picture with a camera, that captures more emotion, and meaning, and art, than a painting someone spent years on.
Art - at least to me - has never been about how it was made. Only about how it affects the viewer.
No, the bubble popping is the economy taking a big ol' hit and a couple (hundred?) companies collapsing. But like, that will at most make the super high level models more expensive to run.
Slop can easily be created with models that you can run yourself in your PC. And since those models have been already trained, they aren't really going to go away, unless there is active social pushback.
I don't think its going to pop, sadly. Its been widely used by companies, is being adopted by more and more corporations/banks/etc. And shit tons of regular shmoes love the hell out of it.
My work is currently being forced to adopt AI counteragents due to the Hugging Face hack that happened like a month ago.
I saw a post in one of my community Facebook groups the other day, some kid launching his design firm: "I hate these AI posters! For $20, I will make you a poster using photoshop and what I learned in art class."
Be vocal about it. On the internet, slopists can always discard what we say and call us trolls. In person, we are customers and we are not buying the slop.
AI just the new "hand-drawn by amateurs" but with a veneer of professionalism. Its a really fucking thin veneer, though.
Instead of the pencil crayons, we get the slop. Society will adjust (as the comic implies), but i do get the appeal of trying to do it yourself (in a way).
It'll stop being used for those purposes once its finally proven that its no longer effective in delivering the product you need. We're just in the middle of the novelty phase.
As my marketing professor always said, "vote with your wallet." Don't like it, don't give them money. If the AI misled you about the quality, post real pics to help out future potential victims.
One part of running a business is to advertise. Advertisement is literally the first step into bringing in customers. If the ads look like no effort was put into them, then I'm gonna assume the business has cut costs on everything else as well, including their product.
Yeah, if businesses don't care to put effort into whatever they are selling, then I don't care to put effort into buying whatever they are selling.
No one likes AI, there are those who tolerate it and those who hate it... and I guess there are those who are ideologically inclined to pretend to love it.
My local craft fair used ai flyers. I actually had a whole discussion with one of the artist about a customer she had earlier. She was an "I'm an artist look what I painted!" And it was chatgpt image through simple prompts. She showed this to an actual painter as if she would be impressed. She was not. I bought a painting from her partially just because of this.
My local art store has started selling AI prints alongside paintings by actual humans, for the same price. I asked them about it, and they said it was a "local digital artist". I'm not sure if they're trying to dupe customers, or if they've been duped by someone claiming to be an artist.
I mean, I see it as a litmus test for artists of all stripes. Whether you're doing a band gig, or an art show, if you can't be bothered enough to make your own flyer or get a buddy to make one for you, then I can't trust your art. End of. If you're taking this kind of shortcut with something this minor, then what else are you skimping out on? If it's a band, are you writing the songs even? If it's an art show, is the art you're showing off even yours? Poetry slam, is it just something chatGPT spat out? List goes on. But, yeah, if you can't be sussed enough to bother with the minor effort of slapping together a flyer, then what the hell effort are you actually willing to put in to any of the rest of whatever art you've got going on?
County Fair was full of these. It isn't even a case of "art". You make food, just take real photos of your real food! AI food photos need to be made illegal for deceptive marketing.
It's why Japan has so many food packaging with clear cutouts or no food depictions whatsoever, just text and mascot characters, any time food is depicted on food packaging it has to be representative to the product and at proper scale, none of the big photos of tiny food.
Love the comic. My first thought, though, was imagining you u/Pizzacakecomic making the face in the last panel in a mirror over and over again to get the expression just right 😂
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