And they still look gross
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I saw a cooking video on YT yesterday where the thumbnail was an AI image. They are literally filming the cooking of the actual food and have the result right there on video, and they made an AI pic of a fake version of it where the rice grains were all regularly shaped and distributed and looked like plastic.
The other day I uploaded a video of a recorded meeting, and I wondered what "suggest a thumbnail" did, so I clicked it. It's three AI-generated images based on the video. That's when I realized that all those YouTube thumbnails that look the same are made from that function.
Did they get rid of the function where you could choose your own frame out of a choice of three? If so, that's diabolical cause a random thumbnail sometimes sucks.
No, the choices to upload your own thumbnail or to select from a random three frames are still there. I was just curious to find out what "Suggest a thumbnail" was, since I figured the random ones were already essentially a "suggest a thumbnail". So I totality, the options are you can upload your own, three random frames, three gen-AI images.
Same thing with YouTube, they could just take a clip from the video if they really don't know how to make a thumbnail.
I think this is already most peoples reaction
I don't think I need a photo of a plate of chips to tell me what chips look like.
Plus there is a good chance that the ai photo looks nothing like the actual food. I thought those looked like weird nachos until I saw the battered sausage and realized this is the other kind of chips.
Imagine getting a pic of nacho chips and cheese from some AI that doesn't know which chips and cheese means from text.
The prices being in pounds didn’t tip you off?
I’m firmly American, but if I say GBP and “chips” I’d assume thick cut fries and not potato or corn chips.
Ah, but you need a picture so you can identify if they're french fries or potato chips.
A fucking fiver just for chips? Jesus Christ. I know I've been away from the UK a while but that still seems crazy.
I wonder how genAI product image gonna fly in Japan, i heard they're required to display the actual image of the food inside the package.
I would bet the restaurant isn't responsible for the AI images. More likely the restaurant didn't upload images and the app "helpfully" generated an image for them. The owners of the restaurant probably either have no idea that this happened or have bigger things to worry about.
Sometimes the restaurant didn't even put the item on their menu. The website decided to "fill in" what was "missing" from the menu. It's how some restaurants discover all sorts of things they didn't know they sold. Sometimes from a service they never even signed up for!
If they don’t know, they’re a bad manager.
Ah yes. The 50-year-old, likely immigrant, small business owner of the local chip shop, who basically wakes up in the morning, spends four hours fighting with suppliers and dealing with payroll, goes in to work at noon and stays until midnight because half her staff called off, and is constantly about £5 away from going out of business, she's a bad manager. Her nephew offered to set up Doordash for her, but then he went off to university last year, and then a few months ago she added a Large size of the Cheesy Chips and Cheesy Chips with Curry Sauce, but she couldn't figure out how to upload the image and didn't know that the app would just make one for her, but it's her fault that the images are AI. She sees ads everywhere that say that AI is amazing and perfect and spends negative minutes per week on Lemmy and the news and the internet in general so she doesn't know all of the problems with AI, so when someone points out that there are AI images on her menu and she says "huh, neat," that's her problem.
Being a scold against AI use is one thing when it's a software engineer or graphic designer who should know better, and it's totally fair for tech bros who do know better, but for complete normies this is a ludicrous complaint. I'm so frustrated by this inane binary purity test. You want to make things better? Don't scold or say "bad manager," educate people. The problem is Sam Altman of OpenAI, not Ashok Kumari of the London East Side Chip Castle.
If you’re not paring attention to ads ads sent out in your businesses name. You’re a bad manager. Full stop.
And no fake bullshit whatabout story is going to change that.
lol, this isn't an ad. This is a page on their menu clearly several scrolls deep on an online ordering site they don't control. Regardless of who you are, this is hard to find unless you're looking for it. And when you add on top that the owner of every single local restaurant I've ever met has been some version of overworked by everything that directly affects their ability to pay rent, calling them a bad manager for not caring about something that doesn't is absolutely insane.
Okaybuddy.
Translation: "You're right but I don't have a logical rebuttal so I'm going to pretend to be dismissive in hopes that it comes across as me winning."
You're just as unbearable as the AI bros who caused this whole mess. "All AI misuse is the fault of the person whose name appears closest to it! Certainly such a narrow view will never come back to bite me!" Get off your soapbox and actually try to help instead of screaming about people who don't even know that what they're doing is wrong.
Translation, I don’t want to read your whiny wall of text responses. Defend AI as you will, but don’t make up bullshit exception-to-the-rule stories because you think it’ll make a point.
It doesn’t
If you actually read what you were criticizing, you'd know that I wasn't defending AI usage. It's objectively one of the most awful part of modern society, third only to, like, fossil fuels and fascism. I am absolutely not defending AI, and you sound foolish suggesting that I was. The fact that there are AI images of food on this menu is objectively and incontrovertibly a bad thing. I'm saying that you're targeting the wrong person for its use.
Some of these food delivery apps offer customers discounts if they upload high quality photos of individual food items so that they can be added to the menu in the app. For example, here's DoorDash's policy: https://help.doordash.com/en-us/consumers/article/photo-incentives-faq
I suspect what happened here is that the restaurant didn't upload any of these photos. The real photos came from customers. But some items didn't have high quality photos from customers yet, so the app uses AI ones instead.
I have noticed the same with food delivery services. Low quality AI pictures, mostly wrong.

That sausage looks like a poo I just had. Sauce and all.
A lot of people are going to say "hey, real food photography is complicated and costly". I'm a photographer, yeah, I believe it can be tricky to get a nice proper and appetising photo of a dish that is so good that you can actually use it in a high profile print ad.
But for web based menus, where most people just see a thumbnail size photo anyway, it really doesn't take all that much to take an adequate photo. The photos shown here could have easily been taken on crap smartphones - you know, if they had done them in real life.
Also, you could just use a stock photo. Maybe it doesn't match the real product, but neither does the AI image.
Curry? It’s gravy ffs; that’s totally Poutine.
The “battered sausage” looks egregious, no thank you. My German roots say nah.
Also, AI food to me is an automatic scam call. Like, if you didn’t cook it, and you let a CPU “imagine” it, fuck you. Eating is the most basic human thing we do, ffs, and applying a camera before eating isn’t fucking hard. Scam.
How can You tell it's AI?
Funny how AI is actually a good tool for cropping and resizing product pictures for webpages. No-skill tasks that takes much time to do manually.
And they just didn't use it for that. Well fucking done.
It's a perfect example of powerful tools in the hands of imbeciles, which is the trademark of AI.
What? Your phone gallery app can do that you know.
Try cropping and centrering a batch of 1000 pictures on your phone.
There's plenty of web apps that do it too, but they also use AI and cost money.
I'm sure GIMP and Photoshop can do it with some scripts, because it's just algorithms, but then the products should also have about the same size even if certain parts stick out. Then you need to analyze the pictures or sort them and sort out all kinds of things hat makes the logical algorithm fuck up.
For this purpose I think it's still easier to have AI clank it out.
i know right. i mean you do have to fight with the prompt. and it can mess up the resolution. and will often pick random formats that don't match the extension which breaks sites with strict security and some cdns. and wasted a ton of power in a datacenter.
but thank god I didnt have to spend 30sec in gimp to get exactly what i wanted.



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