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.

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:

- The food never actually looks good, real, or delicious;

- The information is presented in a haphazard way, with text randomly thrown all over the place;

- 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;

- 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.

> 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.

> They gave her a day to "think about it."

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.

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.

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.

Never let the mob win. They don't deserve her coffee, good riddance.

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.

Small businesses barely get by. Someone with work as transient as "artist" should know better.

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 have no problem with coffee shops intentionally using AI, that said...

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.

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.

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.

The relevant question is how much comments on Instagram actually translate to changes in sales.

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.

As a society we need to start seriously planning on how to ban AI in art.

- I don’t want to listen music with AI generated vocals or tunes.

- I don’t want to watch TV shows or movies with AI generated scripts.

- I don’t want to read novels with AI generated text

- I don’t want to see animations with any amount of AI in it.

- I don’t want to play video games made by any amount of AI. (No FCKIN Blender models made with AI)

- I don’t want any amount of my digital art or posters to be touched by AI.

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.

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.

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.

Im shocked she spent so much to get it printed. The design looks so cheap

"AI-generated" looks bad to a large minority of people. It is not clear if the majority notices, much less cares.

That aside, if you spend 5 minutes prompting AI, you can create an image that no one will clock as 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

The follow up instagram post, so the one after she showed off her awful looking sign:

    > 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. 

    - 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

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".

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.

Everyone in this story is tiring and annoying.

https://archive.is/GSXl6

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.

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.

The owner had to resort to her standby Canva when the employee left, but lacking time due to a newborn.

To me, having followed all kinds of embedded links over to Vermont and Germany, the latter example being extraordinarily unappetizing. [0]

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.

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?

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).

Increasing costs affect not only businesses, but people needing work, some of whom have lost jobs and income, are understandably upset.

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?)

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.

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.

You can't have it all, or damn cheap. You must choose wisely.

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.

My two cents, or "Sixbucks" worth.

[0] https://x02.me/i/F7ZX6.jpeg

The reaction folks had is OTT, but it does look like AI slop.

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.

> "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."

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?

The article says she paid $150 for printing and $200 for a stand. Why not throw another $200 towards an artist?

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'

This primarily, for me, has resulted in me ignoring a lot of long winded tickets.

the user a generate's email/documentation/whatever via claude > sent to user b > user b uses claude to summarize it ... loop is shitty.

This applies less to me for code as long as you are reviewing it throughly and 'sculpting' it throughly to make it readable/maintainable.

Care about your work if you want me to care about your work.

Live by the slop, die by the slop.

Heard this morning on NPR show: The 3 areas were AI fails from the get-go.

Creativity

Taste

Judgement