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The allure of generative AI has turned public-facing billboards and restaurant menus into a Lovecraftian horror show.
Bread that resembles “reptile skin” and “alien larva”-like croissants have been putting off potential customers for months now. While owners are trying to lower costs by turning to AI for their promotional material, the off-putting signage has had the opposite effect, with users on social media lambasting local businesses for doing so.
As 404 Media first noticed last month, some restaurants are finally catching onto the backfired advertising — and are pulling a 180 to score some easy points with the public. Owners and chefs are uploading pictures of themselves on social media, holding up pieces of paper, with variations of the message “We will not be using any AI to promote ourselves” handwritten on them.
Since 404 published its story, the trend has really caught fire, with well-known chefs, like “Chopped” champion and South Carolina-based Nikko Cagalanan, Brooklyn-based Sicilian pizza chain L&B Spumoni Gardens, Phoenix’s Niu Mama, and many others, vowing not to use AI for self-promotion.
Some of these posts are getting hundreds of thousands of likes and hundreds of comments, indicating the posts are really striking a nerve.
It’s the latest sign of a growing backlash against AI, tech that’s infiltrating almost every aspects of our lives, often against our will. The movement has grown from simple annoyance to public outrage, particularly as polluting data centers continue to crop up across the country, sparking a bipartisan crusade.
It’s a particularly thorny subject in the gastronomy world. Cooking has always been a form of human expression and deeply entrenched in cultural values, something an AI model inherently isn’t capable of.
By relying on unintentionally disturbing images dreamed up by an AI, restaurants are sending a clear signal.
“The AI images are a sort of shorthand for saying, ‘Yes, we serve food, but it is slop, just like the photos we use to market it’ — likely frozen and factory-made, shoved into a grease-caked frier, and still somehow lukewarm and soggy when you take your first bite,” the New Yorker wrote in a recent piece about the trend.
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