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.
Starbucks has an amazingly polished corporate image and at least where I'm from the locales have great wall art done by local artists presented alongside tasteful decor and a minimalistic but well cared for choice of furniture that I can't honestly give it no less than a 9/10 presentation.
The coffee still tastes like a Victorian chimney sweeper's piss.
It was just a replacement for those temporary chalkboard menus, the person wo did that previously left. Perhaps she has bad taste but that doesn't mean she was slacking off. Did they spend a lot of time on the chalkboard menus previously?
This is what people are actually mad about when businesses use AI art. You claim to live in an artistic community, great, ask your staff if they have any friends who draw who want to come by and make a quick $100. You spent more money on a worse result that alienates your community.
How would a coffee shop spend an hour making their coffee better
Like you own a coffee shop and you’ve freed up one hour in the 12 weeks before you have to make a new sign, what do you do in that hour that makes the coffee better?
The article literally mentions that they have baristas, one of whom was making the old menu because they were "aesthetically inclined." This can also be confirmed by looking at the employment section of their website.
The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.
Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it. I'd feel differently if some big corporate chain were doing this, but if it's a little "mom & pop"/"hole in the wall" type place, cheap advertising is a neutral-to-positive signal.
the only "threat" mentioned in the article is that someone said that if she didn't take the sign down they would post about it in a local artist community. Threatening people with violence is always unwarranted, but trying to portray talking with other people about what someone is doing as a "threat" is disingenuous.
I think that issuing an ultimatum where if the person does not do what you want, that you will be sharing your concerns with likeminded people online, with the underlying implication being that the business owner will end up experiencing some kind of negative outcome from that, is absolutely a threat.
Okay, but I (and I suspect a lot of people) really don't care if somebody is threatened in that way. If the business person doesn't want other people to know what they're doing then maybe they shouldn't do it. It's not worthy of a news article, IMO.
If somebody threatens them with violence (which is what "threat" is usually implying) then that's a different thing entirely.
"It would be a pity if I were to tarnish jlarocco's reputation within my network. I even have his GitHub from his profile. I'll just talk shit about him to all the CTOs on the block and ensure he doesn't get a job again..."
See how that works? That's why you should care. The so-called influencer-orienter culture has become a plague after social media. And these F&B businesses are the ones hit hardest - remember all those movies in the 90s and 00s about how some up and coming entrepreneur or chef had to win the approval of some hoity-toity food journalist?
Also, rest assured, I'm not serious about badmouthing you or anyone here for that matter - just trying to illustrate a point.
In that analogy, you SHOULD assume the person is an influencer.
In the case of this shop, we're talking about local retail. If you are a retail small business owner you have to assume that any customer can be an "influencer" and cause significant harm if they seek to trash your business online.
If I tell someone that I am going to take a coordinated effort to undermine their business and get customers to stop shopping there, potentially resulting in the demise of the business, the loss of their livelihood and ability to provide for themselves or their family, I cannot think of any reasonable person who would not categorize that as a threat. A threat by no means is limited to violence only.
I am really disturbed by language minimizes concrete actions taken to cause harm.
"I am not hurting your business I am just talking to my friends!"
Sorry, but the business owner has to own their actions. If they have a large customer base of artists who will feel betrayed by their using AI, then it was a mistake to use it.
It's her right to use AI, but the customers also have the right to say they won't patronize businesses who use AI, and are free to tell people they know that the business is using it.
If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
If the "business owner needs to own their actions", shouldn't the people who are seeking to take a coordinated effort to harm that business also "own their actions" and be able to say plainly what they are doing instead of misrepresenting it via "Stop being crazy, I'm not making threats, I'm just talking to my friends" gaslighting nonsense?
If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
To entertain this analogy, if a shop is misrepresenting their ingredients then it can make sense to spread the word, particularly if the shop owner refuses to rectify the issue, because there are health implications which represent a legitimate material harm to their customer base and the safety issue takes priority over the shop owner's bottom line.
An AI menu, assuming it offers a reasonable representation of what the shop offers, has no safety issue.
AI stealing their jobs isn't a "legitimate material harm"?
It doesn't matter anyway, because "using AI" doesn't make somebody a protected class. If people don't want to patronize businesses that use AI, there's nothing wrong with that.
Did you not read the article? She was unaware of the controversy and had just had a baby - which tends to be quite a stressful and time consuming thing.
The milk comparison is specious and irrelevant, because consumers are there for the product. Coffee shops sell coffee, not jpegs.
But aside from that - bullying and threatening a working mother with a newborn is not the moral high ground you seem to believe it is.
She's not a witch, and your assumed right to burn her is not a good look.
Exactly. Pure cancel culture. Just be humble to understand the world might not agree with your views and let it be. Less "this can't exist" and more of "this is not for me".
Cancel culture or not, people are allowed to tell other people they know that something is happening, and those people can decide for themselves to patronize the business or not. To call it a threat is really exaggerating.
The headline makes it sound like people are phoning in bomb threats and violence, which doesn't seem to be happening at all.
Honestly, I think the business owner should have ignored these weak "threats" altogether. It doesn't have anything to do with coffee and it's unlikely they'll get any business because they use AI, so it can only hurt them.
I get you think the word is too heavy but remember: it's a small business and bad press is a serious thing. It could be enough to shut down the place. Just see how afraid local shop owners are of Yelp. You get review bombed there and you have a serious problem. You don't know if these artists won't just unload their (just) frustration at AI on the business exactly like that. By judging the tone "change or I'll tell the artists", it's very likely the person would try to incite them instead of just "telling" them.
As a rule, small business owners (as well as HN's population of temporarily embarrassed tech workers) treats being asked to not take as much profit as possible like being stabbed with a knife
Nobody threatened the business owner. Somebody offered the business a chance to change up the ad (and help doing so) before it got shared, and the owner figured it would be better to go viral with the slop ad. Now there’s an article in Business Insider painting the business as the victim of mean customers that assaulted it by not liking the slop poster, so it looks like it all worked out for them.
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.
It literally is not. You can maybe phrase it to sort of sound like a threat but “I’m going to share your public ad” is never a threat. It’s like if you angrily yell “I’m going to come to a complete stop at this upcoming stop sign!” in a threatening voice and then do that, it wasn’t a threat. Great. That’s what the sign is for. That’s what everyone wants you to do.
In the context of how it was done, saying that they would give them a list of people and a day to think it over, it really is a threat, it's a kind of extortion.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what extortion is. It's only extortion if the one extorting is the one receiving the benefit. Hiring a random artist on Fiverr would still make them happy (since the poster is not AI) but would not benefit them in any way.
That's not what the "threat" said. It said that they would give them a list of people, it isn't obvious that hiring some random would have made them happy. It's not even obvious whether this wasn't just a convenient way to make some money for a friend.
I understand if you don't like how the person phrased it, but the goal of the DM was obviously to get the store owner to replace the AI poster. Assuming that they would have gone on a crusade because they didn't pick a "preferred artist" is pure unsupported speculation on your part.
Saying you’ll do something that’ll harm someone (or, more precisely in this instance, their business) can reasonably be called a threat (in the broad sense of the word), though not necessarily the unfair kind of threat most people imagine when they say ‘threat’.
You can threaten someone with ceasing to be a customer if they don’t change their business practices, and that’s perfectly fine. Sharing publicly available information is generally not a problem, either. But in this case, the author of the message is coming off as very insincere, setting deadlines, and trying to strike up deals, which comes off as unreasonable and makes one wonder if they really are simply going to share publicly available information, or if they’re going to give undue focus over them being ‘uncooperative’. If they did not want their message to come off as a threat, this was very far from an ideal way to write it.
It’s more about the way it was phrased and presented. Just sharing publicly available facts with your community (or anyone really) is not a problem in itself, but the message does rub me the wrong way.
The message’s author is trying to present themselves as someone helpful and compassionate (‘I understand’, ‘I’m trying to help’), but at the same time, they’re one-sidedly setting a firm and short deadline (‘I’ll give you a day’) unprompted and suggesting the café owner strike a deal with one of the people they’re going to recommend. They might have written this with good intentions at heart, but it also wouldn’t feel out of place in a mafia setting (as in ‘do business with us, or else’), so it’s a hard sell.
If they really were compassionate and wanted to help, they easily could have suggested to get the owner in touch with some affordable artists and left her with time to mentally deal with the backlash and all. They didn’t need to emphasise how they were going to tell on her like they were about to launch a vendetta smear campaign or something.
There are no good intentions here. This is the mafia playbook through and through - "It would be a pity if something were to happen to your <insert valuable property or reputation here>".
Well, the basic idea of it is not so bad. A business generally wants to keep their customers happy and care for their reputation, so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal.
The important thing is how we go about it, and whether their reputation remains reflective of their actions, or we try and make it worse than it ought to be. We can’t say for certain the author of the message was going to do the latter, but it does not inspire good faith.
Certainly, but considerate the alternative: the account simply publicly posts about a public posting (not private business). Which happens all of the time for public ridicule or shame. At least this provides some recourse for the person affected. Sure, the alternative is simply to not post in the first place; but such is the nature of large social media accounts.
It's an implied threat, which you can infer from the presentation of the information. For example:
You really should listen to me. If you need some time to think it over, I understand. It's a lot to consider and you've got a lot in your plate. I'll check in soon - would tomorrow be okay? If you need more time, just tell me when.
vs
You really should listen to me. I'll give you a day to think it over before I take further action.
Same information, but the latter assumes a position of authority (I, the person in charge, will be the provider of the time you will receive), and then uses that position to provide an ostensible benevolence as a way to mitigate the implied follow up of non-benevolence. The threat is introduced as the power disparity. The person in power has leverage over the less powerful and the threat is that they will use it. Remove the power disparity, and the implication of threat is also removed.
Unions also use the threat of striking as a leverage point against corporations. As I noted elsewhere in this thread, there seems to be a common fallacy in this thread of "threat = bad". Laws are threats too. You need a more convincing argument than this.
My comment is about how inference and implication can change the result of a message just as much as the content or context. Whatever axe you've got to grind about threats being bad has nothing to do with what I said. Laws are threats. Unions make threats. So what? My point stands. Things that are obviously threats are threats, and things that say the same things in different ways might not be threats.
This. Based on the headline I was expecting a physical threat on the owner, instead we get a screenshot of them treating it as a learning opportunity and the owner responding in an incredibly condescending way.
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.
I would once again like to point out that the "threat" mentioned in the article is someone saying they'll talk about what the shop owner did with their friends.
It's informing people that there is something a business is doing that they might not approve of and they might want to change their behaviour accordingly.
im like you, simply out of apathy. but i immediately thought, "if were the coffee shop owner, would i rather experience a silent decline in business or face public outrage but have an opportunity for redemption?"
ive been called enough mean names by friends and strangers id much rather be called some more mean names in order to become aware of what i could do to win back some customers
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.
I mean there's a pretty big third group there which recognizes the good parts and the bad parts. Right?
For every person who can spot it a mile away I wonder how many false positives they have or simply aren't aware of it. If you're looking for it, with people using it a lot these days, of course you are going to have a high success rate.
But really I don't think it falls neatly into either of those categories.
"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?
Basic economic theory states that only holds if the goods / services being provided are equivalent in the eyes of consumers. It seems self evident here that consumers do not consider them equivalent.
You said that the AI industry feels they're replaceable. I'm not saying that AI does equivalent work, I'm saying that AI companies don't choose the prices for art, they just play in the market.
No it's about people thinking that I should care about their business when they clearly do not. When you use AI in these lazy ways it's clear that you just don't care.
That doesn’t even make sense. If you’re a customer before she puts up the sign it hasn’t magically made the coffee or the service worse. You want to force her to act the way you want, it’s that simple.
Dude, small business owners only have so much to spend on marketing. Before it was AI, it was stock images or Microsoft clip art. I don't care that my plumber has bad logo, it saving money on a logo keeps him from selling to PE and enshittifying his business.
I think you’re right actually. It has always been a thing, but I think maybe we were better at suppressing it in the past. It seems like this sort of open, grassroots warfare is new.
I don’t think it’s the artists who are doing things like this. It’s usually people who aren’t directly impacted and are “working” on other people’s behalf who do this sort of thing. I suspect it’s power-seeking personalities using a socially acceptable excuse to exercise power over someone else.
From a more... pessimistic/optomistic point of view (I'm really not sure which applies here, it depends how you look at it) It is also about a culture with absolutely no safety net, where AI and increased automation moving into someones field (in this case, graphic design work) isn't just "oh, less people will need my services" and more "My income will completely disappear and I will be broke/homeless faster than I can possibly learn something else fast enough to compete with the omnipotent AI".
The way to make these transitions less aggressive on everyone is to not have it tied directly to whether or not someone can afford to eat.
I think that’s letting people off the hook too easily. This sort of mob behaviour is simply normal. Normal means something that happens often, not something we find admirable. With a safety net it would be the same sort of thing - people decide that x is bad and dogpile it to get their dopamine. Some people really like the dogpiling, others like it less, but it calls to an ugly part of our psychology.
I agree that people like the dogpile, but those dog-piles are normally starts by someone who feels like they are personally victimized and threatened by whatever action they are objecting to.
People take things very personally when their core livelihood and ability to support themselves are threatened.
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'
The issue comes when you (or someone, not you personally) dig way to deep into what "it" is, there is always something that someone was, to quote you, "too lazy to do yourself". You might not like the result, and that's fine, but you're phrasing it as if the other person is just being unnecessary-lazy.
They probably bought their display stands instead of designing and building them themselves. They also probably bought the cheap ones from Amazon (instead of building them themselves, or hiring a local artisanal carpenter to build them).
Do you refuse to engage with a pastry stand because the owner was "too lazy to do it themselves"? If you're at a friends house and they order food, do you refuse to engage with it because "they were too lazy to cook it themselves"? Where do you draw the line?
Your point as it applies to something that takes a sufficient portion of your time is valid, but this conversation is literally about a menu sign at a coffee shop. If you spent substantial time engaging with a coffee shop sign, I have questions (and wouldn't want to be behind you in that line).
I would take those stances if they didn't spend any real time picking out or curating their furnature and goods.
If they spent time more time curating better AI images or asked anybody with modern taste and style what they thought we probably wouldn't be talking about it.
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.
The food is in the uncanny valley because no human was involved in assembling the output.
We've got millions of years of evolutionary wiring in our heads to try and figure out if something can be eaten - take that out of the process and you can screw up in a bunch of ways which raise alarm bells.
I imagine that some?/many? customers of a locally-owned coffee shop are choosing it precisely because it's not a soulless megacorp. They're choosing a different vibe on purpose. Ugly AI advertising is the opposite of that vibe.
There are multiple widely replicated common crappy menu styles already. If anything AI generated menus are likely to lift the quality floor.
I recall in particular when I first moved to London and realised you could identify low quality Italian restaurants by whether they had the same laminated plastic dessert menu from some distributor of ready made desserts... The step up was when they'd cut and pasted parts of that menu design into their own template...
And keep in mind we notice the bad examples, because they stand out. They'll fade out of public consciousness as people get better at getting better output out of them, but they're not likely to disappear - menus have clearly been a low priority for a certain subset of places pretty much forever.
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.
I agree to a degree - it feels manipulative on the part of the writer, trying to exaggerate any sympathy a reader might feel.
That said, I also feel that the level of negativity the lady suffered was a little out of proportion to her 'crime' - essentially amounting to bullying.
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.
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?
Or, for that matter - skip the photos, just do text, maybe with a few bits of clip art if you're feeling daring. Photos are hardly essential for coffee drinks, which tend to all look the same in real life anyway.
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.
5 minutes? I'll have spent more time writing this comment and posting the image to imgur than I did having the bot produce that image in the first place.
It's not grand at all; just an informative sign about some fall specials that is direct and to the point. (Nothing about it was done by hand, but nothing about it would get people all torches-and-pitchforks, either.)
Exactly. What we are really talking about is people lacking taste. People don’t want to see shit graphic design. At the state fair this year, all the food places and rides were covered an obvious low quality ai image work. The difference between acceptable and gross can be as simple as a prompt tweak.
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.
first ill address your point and anecdotally i think this is sort of how "normal" people apologize now. i find it gross, personally, but its so ubiquitous ive learned to tune it out
why i actually replied: would have been an excellent punch line if the apology post was clearly ai gen chock full of clauddish. not sure if id come back around to respecting the owner, but id laugh for sure
I think it is how people apologize normally because it's a norm, yes, but it's to everyone's detriment. They don't like it, the people receiving it don't care about it, it's not a real apology, it's just a sort of trapped norm that needs to change. That's why I bothered to point it out.
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.
Why does business insider make it seem like she's seething angry about this situation when the actual content of the response instagram post seems very level headed. (Rhetorical question, I know why.)
- 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
Bam, perfect, hit everything a PR firm would tell you to say to make this go away as quickly as possible...
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.
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.
I don’t see why a president can’t write a “No Generative AI in art” executive order, society has banned plenty of other pointless stuff, I would vote for them to ban this.
I think there are plenty of us, outside of tech circles who want it banned too. It is one of the least popular technologies in existence. Unfortunately I don’t think it will be banned anytime soon, but I do hope we eventually ban 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 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.
It’s interesting you know, back when music piracy was first a thing online, there was a popular idea, even backed by some research I think, that music piracy didn’t impact sales because people wouldn’t have had the money to buy that music otherwise.
The theory was that piracy might actually increase sales due to more exposure of the music to consumers.
AI generated art, AI generated anything really, is very close to piracy, but nobody is making that argument anymore.
I think this is because the positions are reversed - the general public were motivated to find and spread vacuous reasons that piracy was neutral to good as it benefited them. When the general public might be harmed, instead of corporate rights-holders, then it becomes an unambiguous moral wrong.
So it’s never really been about right and wrong, it’s just about who benefits. Like everything I guess.
Why should corporations be given rights equal to humans? I see no problem to okaying one activity for individuals but banning it from businesses and corporations.
No one actually has to care about the well-being of corporations. There are no corporations in the Bible.
Decades ago when corporations were taking over the world, they used to justify it as a proxy for eventual benefits to the standard of living of regular people. I guess now we don't even bother.
People are bombarded with crappy genAI graphics and even if they can't articulate what about it they dislike aesthetically, I believe most are able to draw the short line from the bad, piss-filter, fake-ghibli slop they see to the social/environmental ills most associate with AI. I have mixed thoughts on shame as a tool for social cohesion but in my mind it's a positive that use of genAI for artistic purposes seems like it's nearly universally panned and people trying to pass off the output as their own are (rightfully) clowned.
The text exchange in the article with the thinly veiled threat is exactly how you'd expect someone disempowered (and it's not like working artists pre AI times had a ton of capital to begin with) to act when they are given some power. As we continue displacing, or attempting to displace, individuals up the value chain, I think we'll continue to see echoes of this kind of behavior. When the luddites can't break into the factory to smash the machines, smashing the outputs and users of the machine seems like the obvious choice.
I feel quite bad for her. If you aren’t in the know (chronically online), I don’t think it’s obvious whatsoever that using AI for a poster could be seen as unethical. I doubt she even expected anyone to point it out.
At the same time though, even if time or budget is tight enough that you’d want to use AI, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t still use real photos for the menu items. This style that the AI apparently defaults to is kinda somewhat passable-ish, until you get to the food items which often look like they would inflict you with several status effects.
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 generally go to the store where the coffee tastes better
Agreed. That's actually what OP said as well.
Using AI to make a sign is likely a pretty good indicator as to the effort the owner puts into other aspects of their business.
It only signals to me that they have other priorities.
Correct, but they own a coffee shop, they aren't building rockets. The menu is definitely a significant part of it.
If they can barely do that, then I'm sure they're slacking off on more stuff too.
The overlap in skills between photographing your product and being a great barrista aren't obviously overlapping.
The takeaway seems to be to remove images from the menu.
You think this is a signal of some great barista?
Starbucks has an amazingly polished corporate image and at least where I'm from the locales have great wall art done by local artists presented alongside tasteful decor and a minimalistic but well cared for choice of furniture that I can't honestly give it no less than a 9/10 presentation.
The coffee still tastes like a Victorian chimney sweeper's piss.
As a customer yes, I would have vastly higher confidence in the quality of a coffee shop with no pictures vs one that uses AI slop.
Why?
It was just a replacement for those temporary chalkboard menus, the person wo did that previously left. Perhaps she has bad taste but that doesn't mean she was slacking off. Did they spend a lot of time on the chalkboard menus previously?
Just printing this item was reported in the article as costing $150.
How much might it cost to have someone local show up and produce a decent-looking chalkboard display?
This is what people are actually mad about when businesses use AI art. You claim to live in an artistic community, great, ask your staff if they have any friends who draw who want to come by and make a quick $100. You spent more money on a worse result that alienates your community.
Honestly, I'd rather have a word printed doc for the menu than this. It's not that difficult, doesn't require any skills and doesn't take any time.
IDK, you own a business and do this sort of stuff and all sorts of red flags go off for me.
Unless they use the time they previously spent making a sign into making a better coffee.
How would a coffee shop spend an hour making their coffee better
Like you own a coffee shop and you’ve freed up one hour in the 12 weeks before you have to make a new sign, what do you do in that hour that makes the coffee better?
Spending the money you would have wasted on a flaky local artist to draw an overpriced disposable sandwich board on better coffee beans.
The entitlement is off the charts. The more I read this insanity, the more I hope she printed it at Walmart with a discount coupon.
Yes. It's a sign they spend a lot of effort making good coffee and don't have a lot of effort left over to work on a sign.
They own the business, they don't make the coffee, nor did they make the sign they had earlier.
You might not have spent a lot of time in the world of "small business", but this is hysterically out of touch.
The article literally mentions that they have baristas, one of whom was making the old menu because they were "aesthetically inclined." This can also be confirmed by looking at the employment section of their website.
The owner was not personally either making or serving the coffee.
The environment the coffee is served in is a significant part of the business.
Somehow I don't think that's the tradeoff being made
Seems to me it's an indicator that the owner cares more about making and serving food or drink than they do about advertising it. I'd feel differently if some big corporate chain were doing this, but if it's a little "mom & pop"/"hole in the wall" type place, cheap advertising is a neutral-to-positive signal.
the only "threat" mentioned in the article is that someone said that if she didn't take the sign down they would post about it in a local artist community. Threatening people with violence is always unwarranted, but trying to portray talking with other people about what someone is doing as a "threat" is disingenuous.
Oh, please. You know what they're threatening: an internet mob. That's not just "talking".
It was literally just talking, though.
I think that issuing an ultimatum where if the person does not do what you want, that you will be sharing your concerns with likeminded people online, with the underlying implication being that the business owner will end up experiencing some kind of negative outcome from that, is absolutely a threat.
Okay, but I (and I suspect a lot of people) really don't care if somebody is threatened in that way. If the business person doesn't want other people to know what they're doing then maybe they shouldn't do it. It's not worthy of a news article, IMO.
If somebody threatens them with violence (which is what "threat" is usually implying) then that's a different thing entirely.
"It would be a pity if I were to tarnish jlarocco's reputation within my network. I even have his GitHub from his profile. I'll just talk shit about him to all the CTOs on the block and ensure he doesn't get a job again..."
See how that works? That's why you should care. The so-called influencer-orienter culture has become a plague after social media. And these F&B businesses are the ones hit hardest - remember all those movies in the 90s and 00s about how some up and coming entrepreneur or chef had to win the approval of some hoity-toity food journalist?
Also, rest assured, I'm not serious about badmouthing you or anyone here for that matter - just trying to illustrate a point.
Oh, I get it, but it only works if the "influencer" can actually influence a large enough group of customers, and my bet is that they can't.
If it were me, I would have called their bluff and ignored them.
In that analogy, you SHOULD assume the person is an influencer.
In the case of this shop, we're talking about local retail. If you are a retail small business owner you have to assume that any customer can be an "influencer" and cause significant harm if they seek to trash your business online.
If I tell someone that I am going to take a coordinated effort to undermine their business and get customers to stop shopping there, potentially resulting in the demise of the business, the loss of their livelihood and ability to provide for themselves or their family, I cannot think of any reasonable person who would not categorize that as a threat. A threat by no means is limited to violence only.
I am really disturbed by language minimizes concrete actions taken to cause harm.
"I am not hurting your business I am just talking to my friends!"
Sorry, but the business owner has to own their actions. If they have a large customer base of artists who will feel betrayed by their using AI, then it was a mistake to use it.
It's her right to use AI, but the customers also have the right to say they won't patronize businesses who use AI, and are free to tell people they know that the business is using it.
If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?
If the "business owner needs to own their actions", shouldn't the people who are seeking to take a coordinated effort to harm that business also "own their actions" and be able to say plainly what they are doing instead of misrepresenting it via "Stop being crazy, I'm not making threats, I'm just talking to my friends" gaslighting nonsense?
To entertain this analogy, if a shop is misrepresenting their ingredients then it can make sense to spread the word, particularly if the shop owner refuses to rectify the issue, because there are health implications which represent a legitimate material harm to their customer base and the safety issue takes priority over the shop owner's bottom line.
An AI menu, assuming it offers a reasonable representation of what the shop offers, has no safety issue.
AI stealing their jobs isn't a "legitimate material harm"?
It doesn't matter anyway, because "using AI" doesn't make somebody a protected class. If people don't want to patronize businesses that use AI, there's nothing wrong with that.
Did you not read the article? She was unaware of the controversy and had just had a baby - which tends to be quite a stressful and time consuming thing.
The milk comparison is specious and irrelevant, because consumers are there for the product. Coffee shops sell coffee, not jpegs.
But aside from that - bullying and threatening a working mother with a newborn is not the moral high ground you seem to believe it is.
She's not a witch, and your assumed right to burn her is not a good look.
To be fair to the news, there probably wasn't much else happening in Buffalo NY
Exactly. Pure cancel culture. Just be humble to understand the world might not agree with your views and let it be. Less "this can't exist" and more of "this is not for me".
Cancel culture or not, people are allowed to tell other people they know that something is happening, and those people can decide for themselves to patronize the business or not. To call it a threat is really exaggerating.
The headline makes it sound like people are phoning in bomb threats and violence, which doesn't seem to be happening at all.
Honestly, I think the business owner should have ignored these weak "threats" altogether. It doesn't have anything to do with coffee and it's unlikely they'll get any business because they use AI, so it can only hurt them.
If the Montgomery Bus Boycott happened today most Americans would call it cancel culture.
I get you think the word is too heavy but remember: it's a small business and bad press is a serious thing. It could be enough to shut down the place. Just see how afraid local shop owners are of Yelp. You get review bombed there and you have a serious problem. You don't know if these artists won't just unload their (just) frustration at AI on the business exactly like that. By judging the tone "change or I'll tell the artists", it's very likely the person would try to incite them instead of just "telling" them.
As a rule, small business owners (as well as HN's population of temporarily embarrassed tech workers) treats being asked to not take as much profit as possible like being stabbed with a knife
Nobody threatened the business owner. Somebody offered the business a chance to change up the ad (and help doing so) before it got shared, and the owner figured it would be better to go viral with the slop ad. Now there’s an article in Business Insider painting the business as the victim of mean customers that assaulted it by not liking the slop poster, so it looks like it all worked out for them.
Live by the slop, die by the slop.
https://archive.is/GSXl6
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.
why is talking about this with their community a threat?
"Threat" is a correct term for an attempt to compel action via potential negative consequences.
"Nice business you've got here, shame if something happened to it"
By that definition all laws are threats. And indeed, the fallacy here seems to be assuming that threat = bad.
Its implied the talk is to rally the troops not gather general opinion
It literally is not. You can maybe phrase it to sort of sound like a threat but “I’m going to share your public ad” is never a threat. It’s like if you angrily yell “I’m going to come to a complete stop at this upcoming stop sign!” in a threatening voice and then do that, it wasn’t a threat. Great. That’s what the sign is for. That’s what everyone wants you to do.
In the context of how it was done, saying that they would give them a list of people and a day to think it over, it really is a threat, it's a kind of extortion.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what extortion is. It's only extortion if the one extorting is the one receiving the benefit. Hiring a random artist on Fiverr would still make them happy (since the poster is not AI) but would not benefit them in any way.
That's not what the "threat" said. It said that they would give them a list of people, it isn't obvious that hiring some random would have made them happy. It's not even obvious whether this wasn't just a convenient way to make some money for a friend.
I understand if you don't like how the person phrased it, but the goal of the DM was obviously to get the store owner to replace the AI poster. Assuming that they would have gone on a crusade because they didn't pick a "preferred artist" is pure unsupported speculation on your part.
It comes across as spiteful, I don't think it is at all obvious and it isn't obvious to the store owner either.
We just disagree, and that's why this is the wrong approach to enacting whatever kind of change they wanted.
Saying you’ll do something that’ll harm someone (or, more precisely in this instance, their business) can reasonably be called a threat (in the broad sense of the word), though not necessarily the unfair kind of threat most people imagine when they say ‘threat’.
You can threaten someone with ceasing to be a customer if they don’t change their business practices, and that’s perfectly fine. Sharing publicly available information is generally not a problem, either. But in this case, the author of the message is coming off as very insincere, setting deadlines, and trying to strike up deals, which comes off as unreasonable and makes one wonder if they really are simply going to share publicly available information, or if they’re going to give undue focus over them being ‘uncooperative’. If they did not want their message to come off as a threat, this was very far from an ideal way to write it.
It’s more about the way it was phrased and presented. Just sharing publicly available facts with your community (or anyone really) is not a problem in itself, but the message does rub me the wrong way.
The message’s author is trying to present themselves as someone helpful and compassionate (‘I understand’, ‘I’m trying to help’), but at the same time, they’re one-sidedly setting a firm and short deadline (‘I’ll give you a day’) unprompted and suggesting the café owner strike a deal with one of the people they’re going to recommend. They might have written this with good intentions at heart, but it also wouldn’t feel out of place in a mafia setting (as in ‘do business with us, or else’), so it’s a hard sell.
If they really were compassionate and wanted to help, they easily could have suggested to get the owner in touch with some affordable artists and left her with time to mentally deal with the backlash and all. They didn’t need to emphasise how they were going to tell on her like they were about to launch a vendetta smear campaign or something.
There are no good intentions here. This is the mafia playbook through and through - "It would be a pity if something were to happen to your <insert valuable property or reputation here>".
Well, the basic idea of it is not so bad. A business generally wants to keep their customers happy and care for their reputation, so telling a business when we’re unhappy and influencing their reputation is the feedback mechanism we have at our disposal.
The important thing is how we go about it, and whether their reputation remains reflective of their actions, or we try and make it worse than it ought to be. We can’t say for certain the author of the message was going to do the latter, but it does not inspire good faith.
It's textbook extortion.
Telling a business we're going to fuck you up unless you send our friends work, even by implication, is literally extortion.
Certainly, but considerate the alternative: the account simply publicly posts about a public posting (not private business). Which happens all of the time for public ridicule or shame. At least this provides some recourse for the person affected. Sure, the alternative is simply to not post in the first place; but such is the nature of large social media accounts.
HN needing an explanation of how protection rackets work is like looking up money laundering in the dictionary in Office Space.
I agree, they should've just shared it immediately without contacting the owner
It's an implied threat, which you can infer from the presentation of the information. For example:
You really should listen to me. If you need some time to think it over, I understand. It's a lot to consider and you've got a lot in your plate. I'll check in soon - would tomorrow be okay? If you need more time, just tell me when.
vs
You really should listen to me. I'll give you a day to think it over before I take further action.
Same information, but the latter assumes a position of authority (I, the person in charge, will be the provider of the time you will receive), and then uses that position to provide an ostensible benevolence as a way to mitigate the implied follow up of non-benevolence. The threat is introduced as the power disparity. The person in power has leverage over the less powerful and the threat is that they will use it. Remove the power disparity, and the implication of threat is also removed.
Unions also use the threat of striking as a leverage point against corporations. As I noted elsewhere in this thread, there seems to be a common fallacy in this thread of "threat = bad". Laws are threats too. You need a more convincing argument than this.
My comment is about how inference and implication can change the result of a message just as much as the content or context. Whatever axe you've got to grind about threats being bad has nothing to do with what I said. Laws are threats. Unions make threats. So what? My point stands. Things that are obviously threats are threats, and things that say the same things in different ways might not be threats.
This. Based on the headline I was expecting a physical threat on the owner, instead we get a screenshot of them treating it as a learning opportunity and the owner responding in an incredibly condescending way.
Do we know what said account is?
(If I were the coffee shop, I'd seriously weigh how much business versus hassle they're getting from being on Instagram.)
If independent coffee shops serve decent coffee in a good environment with friendly service, they 100% do not need to be on Instagram.
Im shocked she spent so much to get it printed. The design looks so cheap
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.
I would once again like to point out that the "threat" mentioned in the article is someone saying they'll talk about what the shop owner did with their friends.
"post about it in a local artist community" is not exactly "talk about it with their friends."
It's bullying.
It's informing people that there is something a business is doing that they might not approve of and they might want to change their behaviour accordingly.
Imagine if it said "post about it on Hacker News". That's not bullying
And if the shop owner is Jewish, it would be anti-semitism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
I consider a boycott threat a non-violent threat; legal but an exercise of power that has moral dimensions.
im like you, simply out of apathy. but i immediately thought, "if were the coffee shop owner, would i rather experience a silent decline in business or face public outrage but have an opportunity for redemption?"
ive been called enough mean names by friends and strangers id much rather be called some more mean names in order to become aware of what i could do to win back some customers
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.
I mean there's a pretty big third group there which recognizes the good parts and the bad parts. Right?
For every person who can spot it a mile away I wonder how many false positives they have or simply aren't aware of it. If you're looking for it, with people using it a lot these days, of course you are going to have a high success rate.
But really I don't think it falls neatly into either of those categories.
Much like CGI in movies, you only notice bad CGI.
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?
Sounds like she was undervaluing her previous employee's artistic skills.
Indeed, artists provide a very valuable service. It's a shame the AI industry feels they're replaceable when they're obviously not.
Their price is based on supply and demand just like everything. If AI decreases demand or raises supply then their price will go down.
Basic economic theory states that only holds if the goods / services being provided are equivalent in the eyes of consumers. It seems self evident here that consumers do not consider them equivalent.
You said that the AI industry feels they're replaceable. I'm not saying that AI does equivalent work, I'm saying that AI companies don't choose the prices for art, they just play in the market.
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.
No it's about people thinking that I should care about their business when they clearly do not. When you use AI in these lazy ways it's clear that you just don't care.
That doesn’t even make sense. If you’re a customer before she puts up the sign it hasn’t magically made the coffee or the service worse. You want to force her to act the way you want, it’s that simple.
Dude, small business owners only have so much to spend on marketing. Before it was AI, it was stock images or Microsoft clip art. I don't care that my plumber has bad logo, it saving money on a logo keeps him from selling to PE and enshittifying his business.
This has always been a thing.
I think you’re right actually. It has always been a thing, but I think maybe we were better at suppressing it in the past. It seems like this sort of open, grassroots warfare is new.
Thats true. This story makes me think artists are spoiled and entitled little shits, which isn’t fair to all of them of cause.
I don’t think it’s the artists who are doing things like this. It’s usually people who aren’t directly impacted and are “working” on other people’s behalf who do this sort of thing. I suspect it’s power-seeking personalities using a socially acceptable excuse to exercise power over someone else.
From a more... pessimistic/optomistic point of view (I'm really not sure which applies here, it depends how you look at it) It is also about a culture with absolutely no safety net, where AI and increased automation moving into someones field (in this case, graphic design work) isn't just "oh, less people will need my services" and more "My income will completely disappear and I will be broke/homeless faster than I can possibly learn something else fast enough to compete with the omnipotent AI".
The way to make these transitions less aggressive on everyone is to not have it tied directly to whether or not someone can afford to eat.
I think that’s letting people off the hook too easily. This sort of mob behaviour is simply normal. Normal means something that happens often, not something we find admirable. With a safety net it would be the same sort of thing - people decide that x is bad and dogpile it to get their dopamine. Some people really like the dogpiling, others like it less, but it calls to an ugly part of our psychology.
I agree that people like the dogpile, but those dog-piles are normally starts by someone who feels like they are personally victimized and threatened by whatever action they are objecting to.
People take things very personally when their core livelihood and ability to support themselves are threatened.
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.
The issue comes when you (or someone, not you personally) dig way to deep into what "it" is, there is always something that someone was, to quote you, "too lazy to do yourself". You might not like the result, and that's fine, but you're phrasing it as if the other person is just being unnecessary-lazy.
They probably bought their display stands instead of designing and building them themselves. They also probably bought the cheap ones from Amazon (instead of building them themselves, or hiring a local artisanal carpenter to build them).
Do you refuse to engage with a pastry stand because the owner was "too lazy to do it themselves"? If you're at a friends house and they order food, do you refuse to engage with it because "they were too lazy to cook it themselves"? Where do you draw the line?
Your point as it applies to something that takes a sufficient portion of your time is valid, but this conversation is literally about a menu sign at a coffee shop. If you spent substantial time engaging with a coffee shop sign, I have questions (and wouldn't want to be behind you in that line).
I would take those stances if they didn't spend any real time picking out or curating their furnature and goods.
If they spent time more time curating better AI images or asked anybody with modern taste and style what they thought we probably wouldn't be talking about it.
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.
It has this ick about it that makes me feel the owner lost mightily in a crypto pump and dump several times in life.
The food is in the uncanny valley because no human was involved in assembling the output.
We've got millions of years of evolutionary wiring in our heads to try and figure out if something can be eaten - take that out of the process and you can screw up in a bunch of ways which raise alarm bells.
Ancient cave dwellers wandering the steppes, carefully distinguishing potable lattes from poisonous varieties of herbal tea.
Did they know they were doing an expensive AI image detection training run.
Milk aside, lattes and tea aren't modern enough for this attempt at sarcasm to land.
I imagine that some?/many? customers of a locally-owned coffee shop are choosing it precisely because it's not a soulless megacorp. They're choosing a different vibe on purpose. Ugly AI advertising is the opposite of that vibe.
There are multiple widely replicated common crappy menu styles already. If anything AI generated menus are likely to lift the quality floor.
I recall in particular when I first moved to London and realised you could identify low quality Italian restaurants by whether they had the same laminated plastic dessert menu from some distributor of ready made desserts... The step up was when they'd cut and pasted parts of that menu design into their own template...
And keep in mind we notice the bad examples, because they stand out. They'll fade out of public consciousness as people get better at getting better output out of them, but they're not likely to disappear - menus have clearly been a low priority for a certain subset of places pretty much forever.
If anything, it reliably signals "cheap".
There's a recent meme of AI-generated representations of food being notably unappetizing, even grotesque and repulsive:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ai-restaurant-food-images
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.
I agree to a degree - it feels manipulative on the part of the writer, trying to exaggerate any sympathy a reader might feel.
That said, I also feel that the level of negativity the lady suffered was a little out of proportion to her 'crime' - essentially amounting to bullying.
ya it's cheap sympathy-raising and should be condemned
https://x.com/zackfox/status/1036389932854652928
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
Or, for that matter - skip the photos, just do text, maybe with a few bits of clip art if you're feeling daring. Photos are hardly essential for coffee drinks, which tend to all look the same in real life anyway.
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.
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.
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Please don't sneer like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's certainly true.
It is also true that as a consumer, I do have a right to feel contemptuous towards garish design and the freedom to spend my money elsewhere.
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.
You have to wonder?
I wouldn't call pointing out a business's activities and shop features as much of a threat. You either live with your business choices or change them.
Business is not entitled to people's patronage, they can refuse them for any reason. They are not and should not be shielded from public opinion.
Neither, the biggest danger is being a chiropractor (her main job), taking people's money and wasting their time with useless treatments.
"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.
5 minutes? I'll have spent more time writing this comment and posting the image to imgur than I did having the bot produce that image in the first place.
And here it is: https://imgur.com/6C3zWcD
It's not grand at all; just an informative sign about some fall specials that is direct and to the point. (Nothing about it was done by hand, but nothing about it would get people all torches-and-pitchforks, either.)
Exactly. What we are really talking about is people lacking taste. People don’t want to see shit graphic design. At the state fair this year, all the food places and rides were covered an obvious low quality ai image work. The difference between acceptable and gross can be as simple as a prompt tweak.
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.
first ill address your point and anecdotally i think this is sort of how "normal" people apologize now. i find it gross, personally, but its so ubiquitous ive learned to tune it out
why i actually replied: would have been an excellent punch line if the apology post was clearly ai gen chock full of clauddish. not sure if id come back around to respecting the owner, but id laugh for sure
I think it is how people apologize normally because it's a norm, yes, but it's to everyone's detriment. They don't like it, the people receiving it don't care about it, it's not a real apology, it's just a sort of trapped norm that needs to change. That's why I bothered to point it out.
Heard this morning on NPR show: The 3 areas were AI fails from the get-go.
Creativity
Taste
Judgement
The follow up instagram post, so the one after she showed off her awful looking sign:
Why does business insider make it seem like she's seething angry about this situation when the actual content of the response instagram post seems very level headed. (Rhetorical question, I know why.)
Bam, perfect, hit everything a PR firm would tell you to say to make this go away as quickly as possible...
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.
Reading headlines with this increasingly common format makes me irrationally angry.
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.
It seems like a ban would both be overreaching and won't happen. If your personal preference is to not engage with it, then don't.
I don’t see why a president can’t write a “No Generative AI in art” executive order, society has banned plenty of other pointless stuff, I would vote for them to ban this.
They can do that but it would be a huge overreach. I guess you have strong feelings about it, but plenty of us don't want it banned.
I think there are plenty of us, outside of tech circles who want it banned too. It is one of the least popular technologies in existence. Unfortunately I don’t think it will be banned anytime soon, but I do hope we eventually ban 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.
Ok, but it’s a coffee shop. An Americano looks the same as drip coffee. A cold brew looks the same as an iced americano.
Where i go to have good coffee, these look different because they are served in different cups and presented differently.
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.
"Endeladyze", "Endelaydsze". Painful to read this poor kartveli gogo's gvari being butchered like that. Get a proof-reader, people.
It’s interesting you know, back when music piracy was first a thing online, there was a popular idea, even backed by some research I think, that music piracy didn’t impact sales because people wouldn’t have had the money to buy that music otherwise.
The theory was that piracy might actually increase sales due to more exposure of the music to consumers.
AI generated art, AI generated anything really, is very close to piracy, but nobody is making that argument anymore.
I think this is because the positions are reversed - the general public were motivated to find and spread vacuous reasons that piracy was neutral to good as it benefited them. When the general public might be harmed, instead of corporate rights-holders, then it becomes an unambiguous moral wrong.
So it’s never really been about right and wrong, it’s just about who benefits. Like everything I guess.
Why should corporations be given rights equal to humans? I see no problem to okaying one activity for individuals but banning it from businesses and corporations.
No one actually has to care about the well-being of corporations. There are no corporations in the Bible.
Decades ago when corporations were taking over the world, they used to justify it as a proxy for eventual benefits to the standard of living of regular people. I guess now we don't even bother.
People are bombarded with crappy genAI graphics and even if they can't articulate what about it they dislike aesthetically, I believe most are able to draw the short line from the bad, piss-filter, fake-ghibli slop they see to the social/environmental ills most associate with AI. I have mixed thoughts on shame as a tool for social cohesion but in my mind it's a positive that use of genAI for artistic purposes seems like it's nearly universally panned and people trying to pass off the output as their own are (rightfully) clowned.
The text exchange in the article with the thinly veiled threat is exactly how you'd expect someone disempowered (and it's not like working artists pre AI times had a ton of capital to begin with) to act when they are given some power. As we continue displacing, or attempting to displace, individuals up the value chain, I think we'll continue to see echoes of this kind of behavior. When the luddites can't break into the factory to smash the machines, smashing the outputs and users of the machine seems like the obvious choice.
I feel quite bad for her. If you aren’t in the know (chronically online), I don’t think it’s obvious whatsoever that using AI for a poster could be seen as unethical. I doubt she even expected anyone to point it out.
At the same time though, even if time or budget is tight enough that you’d want to use AI, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t still use real photos for the menu items. This style that the AI apparently defaults to is kinda somewhat passable-ish, until you get to the food items which often look like they would inflict you with several status effects.
The sign looks awesome. haters gonna hate