This is the way.
The “shop local” thing is just a bullshit attempt to prey on people’s emotions and ethics.
At the risk of being down voted to oblivion, I don’t mind if they use AI to touch up actual photos of their food, like improve background , lighting etc.
Note the photo has to be original though.
However, if they use AI to generate the whole photo, that’s a problem.
went antiquing recently. store was large and had dedicated vendor booths. half of them had shitty AI generated “vintage” art.
I was thoroughly disgusted.
though, there was a large booth filled with books going back to the early 1800s and woodworking tools in reasonable condition. most books were poetry, but there were some first edition engineering code books there as well.
it was my happy space.
Instant walk out, never again
You can get principled on that but then also walk out if they have a phone.
You’re not using one are you?
Do they know where those precious metals come from and how they’re mined? No.Most of these people are also blissfully unaware of any AI problems except them possibly taking over the world.
They don’t even need to understand it, It’s just some cool thingy computers do these days.
Then back to their administration or the facebook.
Average shopkeepers are busy running their shop.
They’re not having ethical debates on Lemmy.
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Restaurants using AI for food menu is a sign of bad quality.
The best pizza I ever had was from a hole-in-the-wall place in Montreal with a layer of grease in the windows, thick cobwebs covered in dead flies, and an air-conditioner black with mold.
If anyone cares, or remembers, it was Rock And Roll Pizza on Bleury, where the Spectrum used to be. In front of the NYKS.
It was a Persian guy running the place. One day I convinced a Persian co-worker to eat there. I guess he gave shit to the owner because the next day the place was a lot cleaner.
Basically they made some kind of shawarma pizza that was out of this world.
Oh and the business next door sold sex dolls, there was a fully inflated transexual doll in that window.
I miss that Montreal. I don’t like the crappy generic condo abomination that’s there now.
So anyways, if greasy windows and dead spiders didn’t turn me off, what does it say that seeing some generic gross AI art turns me off?
(I just remembered another MTL pizza place with greasy windows and dead flies that was so amazing a guy drove from the South Shore just to eat there.)
It’s like when I go to vendor halls at conventions and half the vendors are repackaged aliexpress/temu items
I’m fine with the massive Chinese booths like that at our flea market. We get some useful stuff for cheap. But in general it turns me off. Our local Goodwills now sell bottom-of-the-barrel Chinese imports for the same prices as the next better sort of thing.
It’s like when I go to
vendor halls at conventions and half the vendorsany store that’s not a mega-department store all the items are repackaged aliexpress/temu itemsftfy
TBH, the US has been middle-manning economically depressed labor for cheap goods for decades. It just turns out that China is way better at it than we are.
Alibaba/express just made it a marketplace where companies could do it with zero friction.
It’s worse when their menu pictures have the glitch where it makes things look like triptaphobia? I forget how it’s spelled and I’m not going to look it up for obvious reasons…
It’s like they all use one model that can’t figure out french fries, hash browns, or lettuce.
This place has a $35 crab cake sandwich on the menu and can’t manage to take a picture of the fucking thing.
Trypophobia? Went to a restaurant that had ai menu pictures that looked like everything was made of bugs. They looked absolutely disgusting. At that point it wasn’t even about not liking ai, i simply lost my apetite looking at it.
That’s the one. Same reaction. They’re lucky I didn’t puke lol
Oh yeah like it generates the images all roughly textured? I think it’s like a reaction to generated images usually looking too smooth, but they just ended up deep frying them in uncanny.
That’s what you get when you use ai to upscale ai images.
By people not supporting businesses who use AI instead of creating jobs for humans? No I’m not bothered by that at all.
it’s a vicious circle.
Recently saw an AI photobooth. No one was using it, they were taking their own pictures instead.
Why the fuck would I pay you to stick a prompt in when I could do it myself if I really wanted an AI generated picture? You may have cut some of your costs, but now your final product has no value to it.
That’s the thing that really gets me about these folks.
You slop up something for yourself and you are happy with it, ok.
But then you expect me to engage/pay for your zero-effort AI output that I could have just gotten myself direct from the same place you did? Why?
What’s an AI photobooth? I’m just imagining a booth where you have your photo taken and it prints a totally unrelated AI-generated photo. Like, you go for a passport photo and get a picture of Marie Curie and the Hulk windsurfing on the Moon.
Your imagination of it is pretty spot on tbh
There’s a shop near me that has one of those sandwich board signs on the sidewalk with some sort of “fuck the billionaires, support small businesses” messaging, but for some idiotic reason, it has the faces of those billionaires on it, so every time I see it, I just get angry.
Supporting a small business with an AI Poster is much better than supporting a big corporation
Why? Isn’t the small business supporting a big AI corporation? So a big corporation is getting supported either way?
Small businesses aren’t inherently cool and good, many of them would prefer to be large corporations, they just don’t know how to get there.
Creating an AI Poster might literally just be one month of some $5 AI sub or a free trial. There’s no way to verify how much they’re actually supporting the AI Company.
And while your second point is valid, if you really cared about supporting local you’d simply do some research on which local businesses are running with a community-centric approach. Which ones are run by decent people. Etc. That will likely but not definitely exclude businesses that use AI anyway.
I’d also just rather support a local shithead than a billionaire shithead 🤷
If they generate AI slop, they’re supporting the big corporations.
Edit: damn, that’s a lot of AI bros trying to make themselves feel better with “nuance” and “lesser evil” arguments down in the comments. I guess if you don’t see your money directly go to OpenAI, it helps you sleep at night better. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.
You can get an AI Poster created for negligible amount of money. Maybe even a free trial.
Unless you’ve verified somehow that that company uses AI in abundance and not just a few posters, you’re just making assumptions.
If they use AI for a few posters, where’s the guarantee that they will actually put effort into their main job? The kind of person that cheaps out by using AI is not the one I want to be paying.
Again, you’re just making assumptions.
They may or may not be accurate assumptions, but if they change your decision making to instead shop at mega-corp instead of local, they’re ultimately harmful assumptions imo.
Believe it or not, not everyone is keen on sloppifying everything they do. Local businesses that don’t use AI exist. And you can help by not normalizing the slop.
Either you support small business directly and large corporations indirectly or you just support large corporations directly or you walk out in to the middle of the woods, withdraw from society, and homestead. There is not way to participate in today’s society without indirectly supporting corporations.
Sure, feel free to go in to every small shop and argue with them why they should not use AI. But supporting a multiple small shops that use AI for posters is better than giving all your money to Walmart.
This statement is the correct option.
Supporting a small business with an AI Poster is much better than supporting a big corporation.
Or I find a small shop that doesn’t use AI and support them. And if you think they don’t exist any more, well, you helped make that happen.
You get to pick the hill that you die on, but what I am saying is even if they don’t use AI - they still use bookkeeping software, they still file taxes, they still order supplies, they have an email, website and someplace they store documents.
So AI can be your hill that is fine, but you are still picking the lesser evil in other ways. As you said, “I guess if you don’t see your money directly go to OpenAI, it helps you sleep at night better. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.”
Took me a bit to realize multiple of my comments are getting lengthy replies by the same person, and that said person isn’t either of the commenters I was replying to.
You, of course, get to pick whatever criteria you want for supporting or not supporting businesses. But I don’t appreciate walls of text trying to shame me into supporting AI slop.
As I’ve said before (as you’ve surely seen since you’ve seemingly scoured this entire thread to find people who disagree with you), there are businesses that don’t support big corporations in their operations. And if you can’t find any in your local area (presumably the US?), then you can live with the knowledge that your “lesser evil” slop-normalizing rhetoric helped make that happen.
I didn’t realize I was also replying to you over and over. I also understand that you are purposely missing the point. So I’ll leave it at that.
If your “point” is defending slop, then yes, let’s leave it at that.
Yeah so small business without AI slop is clearly better, it’s just that small business with AI slop still supports big business less than you supporting big business directly.
Does it, though? Small business still has more money to throw to corporations than individual people.
A small business with an AI poster is still better than a big business with an AI poster.
And you czn be sure those big businesses are using way more AI
Yes, getting stabbed in the arm is better than getting stabbed in the throat. Doesn’t mean I should go and get stabbed in the arm.
My reasoning was that when you buy from a big business, then 100% of what you spend goes there, while less than 100% of your spending go to big business if you buy from a small business that supports big businesses itself.
It doesn’t make sense to compare the total amount a small business contributes to a big business with the total amount an individual person contributes, unless you have some further factors you think I have failed to take into account.
Why wouldn’t it make sense? If I want to minimize the amount of support corporate LLMs get, it absolutely makes sense to stop endorsing other businesses that use it.
The original claim I made was that supporting small business is better than directly supporting big businesses. You are 100% right about minimising the amount corporate LLMs get, it’s just that your responding to my comparison of small business vs big business. What you want to do is to support neither of them, so I wouldn’t really spend more time analysing what I said since I don’t think it’s relevant to you.
Yes, I don’t really support this “lesser evil” type argument, since both options in the end proliferate corporate slop. If a business can’t exist without using corporate LLMs, it shouldn’t exist.
It’s still a local business so why abandon that because no one there has the creative ability to make “cool” looking ads?
AI for the masses means they can “draw” stuff, even without any artistic ability.
You might mention your dislike of their using AI - and offer your artistic services instead. Shunning business because of their lack of creative ability is kind of silly… made even worse if their product is good and what you want.
or, and hear me out, do market research to identify if what you’re planning to do is a good idea.
when you’re running a business, no matter the size, making decisions based on gut feeling is a terrible idea.
In the instance of a restaurant, “market research” consists of eating there. CGI (AI’s public interface; menus, advertisements, menu displays (as have been in fast food chains for decades) - none of that matters if the food is inedible.
That’s kind of where I was coming from. I give a shit if they’ve got god fucking a unicorn, AI style, in the front window if their flautas and tamales are GOOD. Or their Bün is good. Or their chili cheese dog with pickles and jalapenos is delicious. Or they are the only place to get a Hang Ten with a pocket. Or ALL the Vans. etc.
Mention it to them. Tell them your opinion. Do it correctly, expound on the excellence of their product - some of the best you’ve ever had - and opine to them you feel AI involvement in their establishment lessens the establishment while the food remains excellent or the product quality remains.
Diplomacy. At the local level. If you’re on about homie depot or ded lobsters or wallymart - fuggitabout. If you’re going to shop there - deal with it. Think of that slop as pablum for the droolers. Well, maybe not all droolers, but you get the idea.
