What's this about?
A catalog of real restaurants that shipped obviously AI-generated menus — garbled text, phantom dishes, mangled photos — documenting low-effort AI seeping into physical retail.
What exactly went wrong?
Image generators produce plausible-looking text that isn't text ("Grillled Salmoon $17.9̈9"), and small businesses without designers don't proofread the output. The result is a new genre of uncanny commercial artifacts.
What's the community saying?
HN 199 points, 156 comments
- Half horror-show sharing of specimens from readers' own neighborhoods.
- A defense: these businesses never had designers — the alternative wasn't a good menu, it was Comic Sans.
- Prediction that "human-proofread" becomes part of basic brand hygiene, echoing the slop-vs-craft threads.