Originally published at: This supposedly-popular Austin restaurant is entirely AI generated - Boing Boing
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To be fair, all food is AI generated in the Matrix.
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Looks to me like a classic case of “for the lulz” and nothing more.
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some “influencer” is still going to probably post about the one of a kind experience they had there.
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It’s art.
Someone in London did this kind of trick a few years ago without AI, just by posting fake reviews of his restaurant in his garden shed.
Some of the ideas are great! I’d eat a dinocroissant and there’d be a huge market for pizzachu.
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What if the influencer is also AI?
Side note, Im really worried the world isn’t going to be able to handle this… Whatever it is that AI has coming for us. I hope it is some twilight zone ending where we find out it wasn’t terminators that wiped us out but instead it is our own human shortcomings.
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Pre-AI, people were creating fake business listings for the lols, putting out utterly worthless, low-effort books and articles and short story submissions in a (misguided) attempt to make some money, running scams, etc. but AI really has made it all orders of magnitude easier and more superficially convincing (requiring more effort to unmask it). It’s amazing to see how quickly “AI slop” has infiltrated absolutely every aspect of society, and made the ability to find real things increasingly difficult. I’m really, really hoping that a bursting of the AI bubble (or vigorous legislation) will bring an end to this, because otherwise the problem will get increasingly worse until the internet and everything it’s connected to (i.e. everything) will be utterly broken.
That took effort, and was interesting - this isn’t. This is just more AI slop.
They’re not “ideas,” though - they’re images of things that can’t exist outside an AI-generated picture. These things cannot exist in reality. You can’t actually make a croissant shaped like a dinosaur. (At best, and at great expense, you could make something only vaguely dinosaur and croissant like. It sure as hell wouldn’t look anything like that.) The only way you’re getting that Pikachu on your cooked pizza is if you draw in on, and who the fuck wants that?
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well whatever end humanity meets, it will almost surely be our own fault – whatever the cause of the destruction. so we got that going for us!
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My bet is it’s a combo of thinking it’s fun, getting a little beer money from merch sales, and hoping to get big which will further drive merch sales.
So they get to shitpost in their free time, something many people do for free, making a statement about both how people are too credulous irt internet content and how food trends often have nothing to do with the actual food.
And then they get a modest monetary kickback that could increase if their infamy does.
They’ve already leaned into the Usermag article and made a shirt about it.
Nothing about their web presence seems expensive. Their website seems simple and most of their engagement is done on social media so they don’t have to pay for the bandwidth.
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“Dinocroissant” is an “idea,” good for them
”Pizzachu" on the other hand — well, a local business using somebody else’s I.P. to sell stuff has certainly been thought of before 
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PREVIOUSLY ON BOING BOING
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And to be fair, all good restaurants in AUS are virtual.
(Snark)
(Ducks)
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Figured I should point out that “satire” (scare quotes for a reason) businesses for the sake of selling merch is a thing now.
The one that immediately comes to my mind is Celina 52 Truck Stop.
And “Birds Aren’t Real” is basically making fun of conspiracy grifters to sell shirts.
Better than supplements and gold I guess.
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Hey, if a cinnamon bun can look like Mother Theresa…
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I once met a guy who had a great story about how he famously created a fake restaurant to expose Wine Spectator magazine as a sham.
Long story short, he made a fake website for a nonexistent restauant in Italy (using a friend’s mailing address) and created a wine list based on the worst-rated wines from the Spectator’s recent reviews. Then he sent in an application for consideration in the magazine’s “Best New Wine Restaurants” list, which of course involved paying an application fee.
Soon after, he was contacted with a congratulatory message: his restaurant had been reviewed and awarded a place of excellence in the magazine’s list of restaurants for wine lovers! The next issue would have a write-up written as if a reviewer had actually dined there (which they obviously hadn’t) and loved the wine selection (which, again, was selected specifically because the magazine had trashed those wines). Oh, and would he like to take out a full-page ad to celebrate his restaurant’s accomplishment?
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I suppose that the worst-rated wines were the ones whose distributors hadn’t paid for favourable reviews.
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He had another great story about a scandal at the California State Fair’s wine rating competition.
One of the guys running the event was able to convince the board to do a test to see if the professional judges really had any consistent criteria for wine or were just pulling scores out of their asses. So without telling the judges, they’d slip in multiple glasses of the same wine in the blind taste tests just to see if the same judges gave the same scores. Surprise! They were all over the map, and the judges were enraged and humiliated.
The guy who suggested the test was not allowed to help run the event after that year.
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And in that case, one could make a sofa that looked (a lot more) like the AI image, because you can pick your materials, even if you couldn’t sell it at a reasonable price point, necessarily. If you’re making something out of croissants, on the other hand, you have to use croissant dough, which has certain structural limitations…
I see a surprising number of AI generated images in product ads, where the image looks great (as long as you don’t look too closely), but would be impossible to actually make (of any material, at any price point). Even more than the images produced by Photoshop (etc), all these hyper-real AI images are going to totally destroy everyone’s notions about what things (various products, food, nature… people) should look like, as they’ve become ubiquitous.
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