> If a menu has pictures, I expect the food to look like the picture.

Has food ever looked like the picture, though? I find this position unrealistic outside of an Amazon return excuse.

onion2k 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I'd expect the picture to be an idealized, perfected version of the food. That's how marketing works. But somewhere in there should be the actual food even if it's cold, sprayed with glycerin, and under studio lighting.

An AI image isn't anything to do with the actual dish. That's too far removed from the reality to be considered fair.

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phoghed 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

Motor oil on a perfect pancake from a batch of 10 that they put 100x more effort into for the photo?

Sign me up, I love it.

AI image of a pancake because the small business owner doesn’t have a Kellog’s budget?

Fuck that guy, I hope his business fails

	▲	jackb4040 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The point is that it was the same business making the image and the actual food. Now basically every business will have the same abomination of a cheeseburger on their menu because they all prompted the same thing, and as a result customers lose that signal. So defensively we have to assume the worst, but when we actually do that (or god forbid talk to other people about it) online weirdos like yourself start jumping in front of the bullet.

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jklinger410 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Has food ever looked like the picture, though? I find this position unrealistic outside of an Amazon return excuse.

Yeah man it's unrealistic for restaurants to take pictures of the food they make and use that for the menu. Totally.

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plorkyeran 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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JumpCrisscross 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> has food ever looked like the picture, though?

Yeah. Especially at Asian restaurants. (With predominantly Asian customers.)

If a menu has like clearly painted or drawn images, on the other hand, I weigh them on artistic merit versus anything descriptive.

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thenewnewguy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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.

	▲	jackb4040 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If I got served food at a restaurant and realized that the pictures were from a different restaurant, I would be pissed off in exactly the same way and amount as if a menu used AI slop. The only difference is that with AI slop you can tell ahead of time and decide not to spend money there.