Thread

A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs

82 points · 316 comments · TMWNN

nearlyepic · 1789586705 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
1. adriand · 1789587938 · focus · HN ↗
  Ouch. Have a little compassion. It is not easy running a small business, even less so when you've got a baby FFS!
  > "At 4 a.m., I was holding my pump on my lap and replying to this person, 'I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it that way,'" she told me. "I was so into typing this message that I produced so much milk, it was dripping down my legs because I overflowed the pump."
  Also, it's one thing to dislike AI to the point where it "kills the mood" (for you) when you see an AI-generated poster, so you stop visiting that particular coffee shop. It's something else entirely to threaten the business owner.
  1. chungusamongus · 1789588055 · focus · HN ↗
    The thing about the customer always being right is, that becomes a big problem when the customer is an unhinged terminally online weirdo.
    wackget · 1789588341 · focus · HN ↗
    The actual saying is "The customer is always right in matters of taste."
    It is misquoted on a criminally large scale.
    optionalsquid · 1789638900 · focus · HN ↗
    The evidence seems to point to "in matters of taste" being a much later addition: <a href="https://www.snopes.com/articles/468815/customer-is-always-right-origin/" rel="nofollow">https://www.snopes.com/articles/468815/customer-is-always-ri...
    ChrisMarshallNY · 1789588356 · focus · HN ↗
    The customer is not always right: <a href="https://notalwaysright.com/newest/" rel="nofollow">https://notalwaysright.com/newest/
  2. TheSkyHasEyes · 1789588357 · focus · HN ↗
    Agreed.
    A small business in my city made a poster using stick men and simple drawings(because of the topic at hand) and people loved it.
  3. nxc18 · 1789588396 · focus · HN ↗
    To be fair, the “threat” was to post a story to Instagram, so perhaps “warning” is a fairer characterization of what happened.
    I do have compassion for the business owner though - lots of mixed signals between people selling AI and the people having been sold AI now rejecting it.
    If not even software engineers can keep up (we still see slop posted here regularly), how is a non-tech person supposed to know better. I try to be gentle and/or keep my mouth shut when it’s people who can’t be expected to know better.
  4. ratelimitsteve · 1789588725 · focus · HN ↗
    >It's something else entirely to threaten the business owner.
    Please enumerate the threat, as I've been unable to find anything that passes for a threat in the article.
  5. nearlyepic · 1789589516 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem is, they could have literally done nothing instead. They could have apologized to their customers that they've been so busy with their baby that they haven't been able to get a new chalkboard out. They could have left the old chalkboard out and explained politely to people that the new items aren't on it because whoever used to make them left. They could have written (with their hands) the prices and items in halfway-decent hand-writing in a large enough font, and it would have gotten the information across in a way that was perfectly serviceable.
    Instead, they chose to exploit people and remove art from the world by using ChatGPT. So no, I don't have a ton of compassion.

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