A coffee shop owner used AI for a menu poster—then came the angry DMs and a threat

I've noticed a very sudden uptick in these AI designed signs and menus in my area. I fully understand why they are used by small business owners (fast and cheap), and I think getting angry at or threatening a business owner for using them is a huge overreaction.

That said, my own aesthetic sense is very much turned off by them. It is hard for me to articulate why, but I can name four reasons:

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

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

- There is really only one kind of "style" of these signs that I've seen, and it's sad to think that this style (or lack thereof) may become ubiquitous;

- In a world where AI feels increasingly shoved down our throats, it is unnerving to so suddenly see its rise manifested in the physical world.

> Then came a threat. An account with a much larger following DM'd her and told her to take down the sign, or they would post about it to their local artist community. The person offered to help her find an artist to pay to make a new sign, or else they would post about it.

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

When this is sort of behavior that the "good guys" advance then it's hard not to expect a "bad guy" with money to show up on the scene and thwart it.

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.

> 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 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.

This isn’t really about AI, it’s about a culture where threats and coercion in service of one’s own ideology have become normalised.

I 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 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.

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.