Moksha Mueller Website Manager

“Why does every poster look the exact same now?” I first had this conversation when walking through the CNE, and every poster had that same AI font — you know the one that’s oddly harsh and demands attention. It seems that every restaurant, every promotional poster, now uses AI for their design, and it’s very recognizable. The food always looks extremely fake, weirdly shiny, and sometimes you can even see maggots?

Personally, I find that using AI is a cheap route to take, especially when it comes to the food industry. Restaurants used to put effort into the photos of their products, and while, yes, they still were usually made with shaving foam and other props (and usually didn’t look like the actual product), there was still effort put in. They wanted people to order and try their food, and entice them with what seemed like foamy drinks, or a juicy burger. Now, AI posters feel like a cheap route that has no will behind them. Stick up an AI-generated poster, and it’ll make your food look unreal, literally. It’ll use the same font as every other place and have the same graphics as well. Why should I trust that your food is good if the photos that are on your posters are generated with a prompt through a bot that doesn’t even know what your vision of your food is?!

In a world rising with AI, it feels like the world is losing its creativity. When walking down the street, every hiring poster looks the same as every promo poster, which looks the same as every “grand opening” sign. The art behind what used to go into those signs is lost, and we are blending into one mush of AI slop. Even if the posters weren’t inventive, like a text on top of a badly chosen PNG image, there was a soul behind it, a personality. It told a story of the place rushing to hire a front-of-house, or a company that hired a top-level skilled artist to design its logo. With AI slop, it seems corporate, like every logo is fake with no thought behind their brand, and no personality behind the place.

The rise of AI in such industries is a consequence of capitalism. The rush to spend the least amount of money with the quickest results, so we pump out more and more and more — but at least it’s getting us money (let’s not talk about the decrease in quality though)! It’s ruining our world, not only by depriving it of its colour and uniqueness, but also literally running it down with its water intake, creating an indescribable impact on increasing climate change and tearing down environments for data centres. And all of this for what?! Just so we can look at some ugly AI poster whose food will end up tasting off, because if they can’t even put effort into what they show the public, what are they doing behind the counter away from the public?

Grimes once said, “The way that you present yourself visually totally dictates your audience and everything that anyone thinks about you,” and I stand by that quote, especially in this scenario. So, I will walk right past any place that has an AI menu, or one of those ugly AI posters, and eat at a restaurant that has put thought behind how they visually present themselves.