Restaurants, can we stop with the AI ads already? They’re everywhere, it seems — posters in restaurant windows, flyers on bathroom doors, and just blanketing our Instagram feeds.
The reason is simple — it’s far cheaper and easier to use AI to create a quick ad than hiring a person to do it. In fact, it’s free. And in the world of razor-thin restaurant margins, with restaurants closing weekly, free is a hard thing to turn down.
But when you fully consider the consequences — free in this case is still too expensive.
AI dilutes your brand
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Is that a beer you want to drink?
Screenshot from Instagram
One reason the proliferation of AI ads has become so noticeable lately is that they all look alike. It’s a familiar template: black background, yellowish or reddish text, lots of paint-swipe banners with frayed edges and short, generic talking points spaced just so with equally generic icons.
Maybe there’s a restaurant logo in there somewhere, but it’s lost in this migraine-inducing graphical slop. The result is a rash of ads that all look the same, promoting restaurants that couldn’t be more different. Customers don’t see Restaurant A, Bar B, Product C. They see AI 1, AI 2, AI 3.
Many restaurants don’t notice this because they’re looking at the AI-generated design on its own and just posting it without considering the context. But scroll through Instagram and see how these ads land in the wild, where post after post after post all use the same design conventions, and the problem becomes far more apparent.
These ads don’t stand out. Don’t get attention. And they certainly don’t present your brand, food, or establishment in the best possible light (or any light at all). And with all that being so, what’s the point of even creating them in the first place?
It’s as damaging to your image as outsourcing your food supply to a subpar vendor just to save a few bucks. You wouldn’t sacrifice the flavor or quality of your food that way, would you? But sacrificing your brand — your reputation — by using generic AI slop is even worse because it risks alienating customers and discouraging them from visiting before they even get a chance to try your food.
AI food looks disgusting
AI-created ads are an IRL problem as well.
AI-generated food images are disgusting. Worse, they’re frightening, even disturbing.
You’re a restaurant. Your business is making and serving food. Why — WHY! — would you allow a non-human intelligence with no understanding of flavor, hunger, or satisfaction to create a visual representation of your very reason for existence? AI is essentially an alien, with no ability to understand what your food looks like or tastes like. It has no ability to interpret how another human being might view a food image and desire to eat it. It fails every – single – time.
You’re better off not including any photos at all.
Using AI to advertise a business that serves food just because it’s easy only tells me that you don’t care about your food at all and just want my money. So why would I go?
Which brings me to …
AI alienates customers
Look familiar?
Screenshot from Instagram
Many diners are turned off by AI ads on a subconscious level. But some people are far more overt and militant about their distaste. To them, throwing up an AI slop ad signals that you just don’t care, and they’re gonna let you know. On a near-daily basis, Instagram flame wars and Reddit meltdowns erupt over this or that restaurant and their awful AI ads, incurring the wrath of potential customers.
This is more than just your garden-variety social trolling. In some cases, these are actual customers who feel betrayed. They see these ads as an indication that you are inauthentic and part of a growing societal problem. You’ve become the enemy. Meanwhile, all you’re trying to do is drum up awareness around a daily special. Turning to AI seems like a efficient solution, but you’re playing with fire.
The tech takeover
Underlying these problems is the slowly eroding relationship between restaurants and customers, caused by technology platforms inserting themselves into the mix cloaked in the disguise of convenience and affordability.
Customers no longer raise concerns while dining. They leave silently and instead complain loudly on Google reviews, when you no longer have a chance to fix the problem.
Diners don’t call to make a reservation anymore. They use a digital platform, where their reservation becomes just another number, their requests another field. And then they wonder why they got a shitty table on their birthday.
Marketing has almost entirely moved to social platforms, where the algorithm decides which ads your customers see or which creator’s video you paid for is streamed, causing you to treat the algorithm as the audience instead of actual people.
Each step takes you further and further from a real connection with customers. AI ads are just the latest. They’re content created by a machine, designed to attract the attention of an algorithm, to prompt interaction with an app. What the hell are we even doing?
Restaurants are not alone in this, as it’s a reality for nearly every business seeking customers today. But it feels more damaging in the food and drink space because — in the greatest of ironies — restaurants and bars are the places designed to bring us together. Food is what makes us most human. Your marketing should be as well.
Instead of a free AI ad, just take a photo — any photo — of your food and share it like a real person. You can get a subscription to Canva for under $150 a year per user and use any number of templates to throw together a simple ad. It doesn’t have to be slick. It just needs to be real.
We live in a digital world during challenging economic times, and those are the cards we’ve been dealt. Going full analog probably isn’t realistic. But we should draw a line somewhere, and AI-generated ads feel like a good place to start.
Yes, AI ads are free. But are they worth it?
Dining and Cooking