This is the main reason I heavily dislike the obviously AI generated Flyers, posters and menus you see so often nowadays. When i look at your menu, flyer or poster, the main thing I want to know is "What is this and what can i expect from it?". Real photos of your actual food, embedded in an AI generated layout/design? Good! Great even! "Chatgpt, please make me a flyer for my burger joint"? might as well have a no pictures plaintext flyer/menu.
Many if not most restaurants weren't using real photos of their actual food long before gen AI was a thing, especially in promotional materials.
I really, really wish I were making this up.
Is abstract art "not real art" if it doesn't generate any emotions at all?
> AI art has also seeped into the actual haunted houses themselves. AtmosFX, one of the largest providers of digital projections to the haunt industry, has admitted to using AI to create some of their characters.
Big TV and projectors are very cheap now.
For the vast, vast majority of people, this will make either little difference, or improve the experience.
Modern image generation has fixed most of the obvious tell-tales like mangled hands, square pupils, etc. And the few that remain end up looking like spooky things, which are pretty good for scary art anyhow.
1. You can no longer judge what an event will be like by its materials
2. Everything starts to look the same, and you feel like you've seen it all before
Maybe these effect will attenuate as people start getting more adept with AI. But I think we're in for a least a few years of this.
The usual counterargument is “well I would gladly pay more for man-made art!” which is a fair personal preference, but judging by the market most people clearly disagree, and businesses aren't obligated to cater to your niche.
I know the AI ultras get mad when you point out that AI slop is bad quality, looks bad, and results in a worse aesthetic experience, but it's reasonable to have taste and to rebel against all design and illustration being brought down to the level of obvious low-effort content. Just because you have no taste, does not mean that other people must have no taste, or that having taste is somehow elitist.
The tradeoff you gotta contend with is that by making AI-style art effectively zero-cost and everywhere, not only does it immediately signal zero effort/taste on the part of the people using it, it also makes everything look the same. Composition, color choices, and style of AI-generated art is so samey, and people respond to that sameness negatively, for good reason.
As an art teacher of mine often quipped, it does not matter if it took you five minutes to make it, it just can't look like it took you five minutes to make it. Art tickles the brain when the viewer perceives aesthetic choices being made -- interesting, sometimes surprising, or skillful ones -- and the choice of AI-generated art signals to the viewer that no such choices were made.
(If AI is used is actually ultimately irrelevant, it's whether something is crap and lazy people can tell it's crap and lazy.)
This is a major complaint people have had with the TV and movie industry for most of the last two decades.
> So, imagine my disappointment when I walked up to my first haunted attraction of the year and was immediately greeted by low‑quality AI art. One of the images was so bad that it even included the Gemini diamond in the lower‑right corner of the page.
The image in question is a sign or menu, the sort of thing that's usually neither good nor bad. Here it's exceptionally bad because it "included the Gemini diamond." In other words, it's exceptionally bad because it's AI, and for no other reason.
At this point, I don't know if it has much to do with quality...
Since this is primarily still a programming site, consider mediocre code that looks like it works but clearly nobody actually made an effort to make sure.
Most people in this thread probably use AI all day to do their job for them. But god forbid a haunted house not hand-craft their flyers.
How about we let this part time business focus on entertaining it's visitors rather than wasting time virtue signaling to hypocrites.
What do you think "virtue signaling" means?
Did you read the article and understand the author's dislike, or did you just come here to whine that if I think AI is a bad choice in one context, I can never complain about it in any context? I assume you're aware that is a trivially silly and childish position.
When McDonald's uses 10s cooked patties with plastic and craft materials to make their fotos it isn't exactly any different then when a restaurant AI generates pictures of their menu's. The Burger at McDonald's has never looked like the pictures nor will it ever.
It's a choice the owner has and if they oversell expectations it's on them to deal with the consequences. At some point it also becomes fraud.
Which would be good?
Second, and more importantly, graphic design (like programming, game development, video production and everything else AI enjoyers claim to be "liberating" from "the gatekeepers") was already available to the masses. Often the only gatekeepers are imagination and effort, and if AI enjoyers don't want to put in either, it isn't surprising the results are so often ugly and mediocre.
These events(amateur ones anyway) usually have a comic sans flyer made in word with some clip art pumpkins, let's be realistic. The art and the flyers shown in the article look great.
This kind of anti-AI sentiment really is baffling to me, as baffling as anti-trans sentiment.
The two really have a lot in common if you look beneath the surface: both are instances of aggressive intolerance as a response to other people failing to live up to an arbitrary moral standard the aggressor has decided they have the right to impose on other people, whether or not those other people have any interest in the aggressor's arbitrary moral standard.
The response to the aggressor is the same in both circumstances: "but how does that affect you in any way?", with the honest answer being that it doesn't, and the more likely answer being some goofy rationalization invoking the rest of society's collective well-being, as the aggressor fantasizes everyone else as better off if they all also adhered to the aggressor's choice of arbitrary moral framework.
I am very sorry but these are not related at all.
P.S. No need to apologize for politely expressing ideological disagreement :)
Why. I literally don't understand it. Is the menu clear? Is the food good? Why would you be disappointed over a _menu_ of all things? I could maybe understand it if I went to a Michelin star restaurant for a £400/head tasting menu and they had an AI generated menu - purely because I'd feel like if I'm spending this much money, I expect you to actually have a silk wrapped menu written by hand, ideally. But at a local pizza place? Who cares?(I mean obviously you do, but I don't see why)
If does, then: The menu is an important part of the experience. It's the first part of the experience that involves the food itself, and it leaves an impression just as every other aspect does.
An in-house menu is usually lovingly crafted by the marketing minds, and the glowing description of the food they're serving is at least... accurate, in terms of ingredients and presentation.
For a recent example, a Chinese menu listing egg rolls. The LLM summary says they "sometimes include meat". Well, what kind? And wouldn't it be a good idea to commit to a "yes" or "no" before I order the thing?