Santa Cruz restaurant changes logo after flurry of negative reviews for AI art
sfgate.comI run a Reddit group. Someone thought a fantasy book cover was AI art, and everyone piled on, talked crap, attacked the author, etc. Turns out 100% human by a well-known artist.
We had to make a rule against AI witch hunts. It brings out the worst in humans.
Seems like people just need meaning to exist. 5g, ev’s/oil/renewables, smartphones, privacy, identity…
This isn’t just a story about an AI logo, it’s a story about locals who feel the business they frequented was replaced by someone trying to make a quick buck.
And an owner who believes that means the locals want to “destroy” her business.
Im not choosing a side, but it doesn’t seem like they have a strong future with or without a logo. That’s just Santa Cruz culture, very aggro surfers.
Many of the surrounding restaurants are very immersed in local surf culture and put a great deal of resources and effort into their decor.
Echoing that. 99 Bottles really was an institution. It had the feel of a proper local pub: warm, a little scruffy, and full of character. The walls were covered with bottle caps from all kinds of beer brands — probably more than 99, honestly.
And if you made it through all 99 beers on their list, you got a small plaque on the wall, about the size of one of those e-ink grocery price tags. It was a great tavern-like atmosphere, and the kind of place that felt increasingly rare even before it was gone.
I just am always in awe of successful business owners who don't leverage their success into a business loan to buy the building or one nearby. I grew up in Austin, and there are a few businesses that have no business still sitting on their little plots to obvious places are: El Patio and Dirty Martin's. How are they able to stumble along with low prices and old school menus? Well, they own the property they sit on.
Time and time again, I see businesses fighting against rent-seeking landlords who are happy to remove a well-loved successful business for an extra few hundred a month. It's happening right now to Yard Bar (my favorite weird spot in Austin right now).
I know it's a thin margin business, but I wish every successful spot would take every damn dollar they made and at least by a comparable property so they have leverage against these landlords. It's a pointless destruction of value that doesn't have to happen to profitable well loved businesses.
> That’s just Santa Cruz culture, very aggro surfers
This sums it up well. If this were in New York, I’d be on the owner’s side (provided the food lives up). In Santa Cruz, it’s just tone deaf to (a) not involve the community in the design process, (b) not take the hint from the reviews and then (c) play the victim in the media.
Maybe Santa Cruz residents should grow up. Thankfully we seem to be making progress against this NIMBY micromanaging culture up here in SF.
> Maybe Santa Cruz residents should grow up
It's their town. Also, I can't help but wonder why the owner didn't fight fire with playful fire–her place is literally called the salty otter. Be lovably salty!
"involve the community in the design process".
I'd create an ad campaign for all my competitors-flyers, doorhangers etc. with the same info their usual ads have, but with slop-AI art all over them.
There isn't anything wrong w/ Santa Cruz that couldn't be solved by motivated YIMBYs parking a city of 800,000 people on top of it.
There are so many automated processes in a restaurant, starting from machine pressed building materials that took a livelihood away from honest human woodworkers and carpenters. Someone please help me understand why this reaction isn't just the latest form of Ludditism (Luddism?) that'll naturally fade away as time passes.
1) Because the people who contributed to the development of those other processes received fair market value for their work (for the most part). The vast majority of contributors to the process that made this logo have not been compensated for their work. This differential can lead to an ethical judgement about the process, which can transitively be applied to the logo made with the process, and the restaurant as a whole.
2) Some automated processes lower the quality of outcomes. Microwaving food might be a faster/cheaper way to cook, but customers might criticize the results.
3) Some processes can be viewed as having lower value compared to others, independent of result quality. This is particularly common in the art and service industries, for which the logo of a restaurant is very much at the intersection.
This is such a deep insight—you're really onto something here! This isn't just about a particular restaurant, it's a microcosm of a wider societal issue. It begs the question, why even have logos at all? Or names? For maximum efficiency and expediency for the owner the optimal restaurant of the future is a 3d printed, fully automated food cart with an LLM cashier that accepts any order and delivers it out of its nutrition depositor directly into your hands (no waste, eco-friendly!!! :D ).
Even worse is it's just a small percentage of her patrons --but they have made it their temporary life-goal to change the restaurant in their image. Like, if you don't like the logo or how they went about creating the logo, go to a different restaurant and let others enjoy it without your jealous 1-star reviews.
Those same people are probably mad "desktop publishing" took the livelihoods of people who drew things by hand, used multi-media plus used exactoes and paste to bring designs to life.
As someone who grew up in the pre-computer graphic arts, in Santa Cruz ironically enough, it was not paste but hot wax. Though in the early days of computers in graphic arts, all the graphic artists were just happy to not have to deal with photo typesetters anymore...
1 star reviews, wherever they exist, are always left by a small percentage of patrons. And jealousy has nothing to do with it. Despite all the marketing budgets and hype wave, you can't force people to tolerate this stuff.
Sure but it’s not organic -it’s organized by malcontents. They’re not voting on the food or hygiene but on their purist perception of what and how a logo should look and be made. If they were blind they couldn’t give a rats ass.
If you're running a retail facing business you're going to have to reckon with the fact that people have opinions about things. And they might have reasons you think are logically unsound. Trying to debate them will probably not be very fruitful. If I saw two restaurants and one had an AI logo I'd go to the other one. Regardless of whether anyone tries to argue that I committed a logical fallacy.
There are many concerns and complaints about LLM technology that don't apply to other forms of automation or even other forms of AI. You're free to disagree with all of those criticisms, but they're simple to understand and they're discussed here and everywhere daily. If you don't know what they are, it must be intentional and I'm skeptical about your curiosity.
a lot of people on here are going to instantly defend any AI use in spite of the specifics but the over-abundance of blatant diffusion model art in cost-cutting nowadays, in places where it isn’t even expected, is ridiculous. marketing is by no means the peak of artistic endeavor but genai logos for small business street taco vendors, coffee shops reek of laziness. never mind the inundation of places like Etsy and Redbubble where it is getting increasingly less possible to find stuff made with human intention. shades of the anti-materialism of the 90s: now consumer products are all just generated, never made.
there is this coffee shop in downtown Seattle, Artly coffee, that operates on this gimmick of serving robot-produced coffee. a 20 year old employee hangs in the back to essentially do nothing and sit on their phone. it is a silly experience worth trying once, but no more. Coffee by itself is already a cross section into the hyperindustrial production that has informed the trajectory of our lives since before being born, but i feel regardless there are such things that are a step too far
To be honest, that coffee idea sounds really good to me.
Not having to deal with the currently still trendy coffee culture and getting exactly the same coffee every time sounds perfect. Or let's say, it's perfect if the product tastes good.
There are few companies in this space . There is one right in Palo Alto - a demo store from the equipment manufacturer https://yummy-future.com/
Coffee is not that much different from Starbucks or any other big chain or even many indie places.
coffee was mid. it's right next to pike place, you can get actually decent coffee down the street. not talking about starbucks either
> One remaining one-star review on Google reads, “Their logo is AI generated, if they can’t make the effort to create a logo they definitely won’t make the effort to cook good food.”
I'm not sure what it's called, but there has to be a name for this logical error.
It’s an example of logical fallacy, specifically a non sequitur. It actually combines a few related errors: non sequitur, hasty generalization, guilt by association, and false cause (post hoc ergo propter hoc).
The reviewer is essentially saying: “If they cut corners on X, they must cut corners on Y”, which is a common logical error in making judgments based on incomplete information.
A logical error is not the same thing as a practical error.
Is this equivalent to defending the broken clock as right twice a day?
Another way to put it is that Logic deals with cause and effect situations with a correlation of 1. It's possible to have a correlation of 99%, which would be a logical error, but still a very useful bit of practical knowledge.
In this case, I would definitely agree that people that act sloppily in one aspect of business will almost always do the same in other aspects. More generally, I'd say that most classical logical fallacies are actually useful rules of thumb.
On the other hand, the indignation over faulty logic I’ve seen in multiple comments already is somewhat ironic considering the hundreds of times I’ve seen the Van Halen brown M&M story invoked on HN as an example of a brilliantly simple heuristic for predicting quality.
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Horn Effect: causes one's perception of another to be unduly influenced by a single negative trait.
Seems valid to me. I won't read articles with model-generated header images, because it's a good indicator the rest of the text will be slop as well.
For a restaurant, a slop logo gives the impression that the owner doesn't care about the details and has no taste.
Beyond that, the use of generative models is a big moral issue for a growing number of people.
Yes, this isn’t a logical error at all. If you don’t have taste in one area — actually, it’s even worse, you’re not even aware of your own lack of taste — why would I trust your taste in another area?
The best Mexican places I've been to in CA had decor reminiscent of a big-city bus station, despite how good the food was.
Why would lack of taste in graphic design be even remotely related to lack of taste in food preparation?
It's like arguing you wouldn't trust a lawyer with a medical negligence case if they can't suture a wound.
Or you wouldn't trust a graphic designer with a restaurant logo if they can't make good scrambled eggs.
This is assuming that the owner is also the chef, and exclusively concerned with cooking. Being a restaurateur is a multi-disciplinary job. The owner's job is literally to have good taste in all areas of the restaurant business: food, interior design, hospitality, branding and marketing, etc. No one is saying that they have to be a graphic designer. The obvious answer here was to have the good sense to hire a local college art student for like $300 to make an endearing and meaningful logo.
The real scarce resource in the world is legitimacy. People seem to strongly associate AI with low legitimacy. Extrapolation from low effort and inattention to details has always existed but AI legitimacy poisoning is a new and bigger phenomenon than just a logical error.
> there has to be a name for this logical error
Are you looking for "category confusion"? It's a conflation, but let's look at the logic. (So yes, my prior is that there is logic.)
"If they generated their logo by mumbling things at a toaster / picking something from the vending machine and then 'owning' it, how likely is it that they stole a sandwich in a grubby wrapper from a bum and are going to hand it to me and say 'I made this'?"
Edit: the article is paywalled, but a number of comments remark on the owner's sense of entitlement. So my moot is probably close for throwing blind. So then that might be the real issue, and the logo is a proxy for a perception of lack of work + mental bullying.
AI models are explicitly sold and advertised as a way to reduce labor cost to zero. If you want to reduce your cost to zero in one area (at the expense of other real people) you most likely will seek to drive costs to zero in other areas (at the expense of your customers).
I don't think that's a logical error at all. That is the explicit and overtly stated plan and promise of AI.
It’s not a logical error, just common sense. Eg. how you do one thing is how you do everything.
> how you do one thing is how you do everything.
That simply isn't true though. It's not even possible to be true. Will a neurosurgeon put as much time in their cooking/cleaning/etc as they do their surgeries? There's not enough time/energy.
that’s a pretty big oversimplification. it means that the way you do one thing is indicative of the type of person you are. if someone cheats on their wife, don’t trust them as a business partner. if someone puts in a lot of effort into a group project, you can probably trust them to take on responsibility outside of school as well. if someone always cuts corners on the “small stuff” like not tucking in their bedsheets all the way, not vaccuming under furniture, etc, they’re probably going to take shortcuts on other things as well. and if someone takes lazy shortcuts by generating mediocre ai slop art, they probably have a similar mentality to the food they make as well.
99 Bottles was never a beloved pub.
I understand and even agree with these sentiments, but in the back of my head is a voice which says "artists have been copying and even stealing from one another since there has been art - what is it that makes this different?"
Laziness and cost cutting, the generated logo doesn’t even look good.
A logo is quite literally one of the first things you see, it informs your first impression of a company. If they really care so little about that: then it does follow that they also care little about food standards, quality ingredients and paying their chefs/waiters appropriately. All of this leading to a poor experience.
A bit of artistic inspiration is fine, not everything has to be the pinnacle of design: but you know what? Those blatant mcdonalds logo ripoff logos or “falafel king” don’t inspire confidence either.
I think this is the honest answer. We can wax lyrical about AI ethics. But using AI to make a crappy logo and then getting into a fight with locals over it doesn’t scream hospitality savvy.
That the artists don't get paid anymore.What is it that makes this different?Nobody likes picturing a world without art, and if nobody gets paid to make art... where does the art come from?
Nobody likes thinking where this trend goes. If we automate all the jobs away... everyone will starve.
Good artists get paid plenty. The hard part of art was always about either representing emotion, or a story. AI can't do that as it has no emotion, nor story.
I would prefer a vibrant marketplace for human artists more than I want cheap design to be available for businesses. I want thriving passionate creative people cooking the food, making the art, writing the articles, and being able to pay their bills off of it. Maximum efficiency is not a goal I care about at all costs, we already have enough efficiency to house, feed, clothe, and educate everyone. And efficiency to what end?
Obviously what I want isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, but its why I don't support using AI for anything creative over and above the ethics of companies capturing all of the value of everyone's past artwork, which also is soulless and aesthetically disgusting, much more so than an artist spending 1000s of hours learning from studying other art and synthesizing a similar style.
all art has lineage, but all art is not simply reducible to mimicry. the act of creative endeavor is not to just be a parrot
Fortunately, the solution is trivial. Just spend a few hundred bucks on an artist.
Seems like much to do about nothing. It's just a logo..
How out of touch these owners are.
Yes. “A lifelong dream has been crushed by a group of locals,” You don’t have some kind of built-in entitlement to success just because it’s your dream. Yeah it’s unfortunate you didn’t succeed, but if you don’t win your locals over, you’re going to struggle to run a restaurant.