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I have been a victim of Reddit many times. I’ve been berated and humbled for having the audacity to ask what I thought was a perfectly innocent question, such as ‘why isn’t my dishwasher working?’ or ‘which restaurant in Bristol would you like to read a review of?’
Yet like some masochist, I keep going back. When I tire of whatever nonsense reels the algorithm has decided to prescribe me and my allocated personality this week (the interiors of tiny homes, most recently), it is to the Reddit app I turn. To me, it feels like one of the last true-to-itself corners of the internet.
It was on Reddit that I came across the following.
This led me to all sorts of existential questions, like: what is cow equals cow equals cow? What words can I find when the letters are made up? What moo does match?!
The destination-less cow maze sums it all up. Where exactly are we heading? For anyone that can’t be bothered to study the above text in great detail, it’s an AI-generated children’s ‘menu’ (read: activity sheet, because it doesn’t contain a single menu item) from Gloucester Road pub The Crafty Cow, which makes absolutely no sense. Those poor children. I mean it’s a Greene King, so we mustn’t expect much. But it illustrates a wider problem: that AI is being used ever more frequently in hospitality, and not always successfully.
Most visibly, AI is being used to design menus and promotional posters, social media graphics, A-boards and flyers, and it’s deeply off-putting. You’ve probably seen one and they all look uncannily similar. The food doesn’t look real, nor does it look nice, and it leads me to one conclusion — if you can’t be bothered to take a picture of the food you’re serving, or it doesn’t look good enough, then why would I order it?
If I were less clued up and spent less time obsessively consuming food media, I might even be convinced that the AI photo is the real thing, and then be sorely disappointed when the actual version I’m served looks nothing like it. No restaurant using AI-generated food images is setting themselves up for long-term success.
Most hospitality businesses don’t have the money to pay for a graphic designer — and amidst the thousands of other things they have to pay for, I imagine it’s fairly far down the list of priorities and rightly so. But AI is not the silver bullet some think it is. It’s inauthentic, unrealistic and frankly weird to look at. I’d much rather see something overtly homemade that shows a bit of care, like the brilliant Picky Bits posters.
I’d rather see no image at all than one that’s been AI-generated. Leave me to imagine the finer details — that’s fine. Or take a photo of something that is imperfect; it’s food, after all, it’s not always going to be gloriously aesthetic.
I suspect we are going to see more and more of this over the coming months and years. Social media has already meant that the same dishes end up on restaurant menus across the country, leading to restaurant convergence. Now we are going to see promotional convergence too; images that all look eerily similar to promote dishes that have been doing the rounds on Instagram.
Just like the maze, the end-game here doesn’t lead anywhere good. Moo + moo = me not coming to your restaurant. In the age of AI, imperfection is the goal, and a human touch tastes far sweeter.
All words and photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
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