AI images on your menu: your customer sees right through it

What the guest sees at the door

TechCrunch AI covered research into AI-generated menus. Restaurant owners use generative AI to brighten up their menu. Customers recognise the generic images and copy, and back off. The research shows this AI material damages trust in the place itself.

The striking part: the guest usually cannot point at what is wrong. He feels it. The burger in the photo looks too smooth. The description reads like every other description. And then he walks on to the place next door.

Sameness costs you customers

This stopped being a hospitality story a while ago. I see the same images on a photographer's website, in a DJ's promo text, on a coach's landing page. The same blue gradient, the same sentence about a passion for the craft.

For a self-employed person that is more expensive than it looks. You are selling yourself. Your face, your hands, your way of working — that is the product. The moment the front of your business sounds like the front of a thousand others, your customer has nothing left to choose on but price. That is exactly the fight you do not want.

So: photos of your own work, your own words, your own rates. Even when it looks rougher than whatever a model spits out. Rough and real beats smooth and generic.

The work nobody sees

I would rather put AI on the work no customer ever looks at. The quote you still have to type out at night. The email asking whether you are free on 14 June. The receipts, the calendar, the reminder about that invoice from seven weeks ago.

That is where your money sits. Add up what you spend in a year on separate subscriptions, on the person who built your site, on your bookkeeper, on the hours you push into admin yourself. People search for the cost of outsourcing their marketing and for an AI assistant for small business owners in the same week — because they sense something is off, but they have never done the sum.

Do the sum. With me it is one subscription of €35 a month, cancellable monthly. If the sum does not come out in your favour, I say so before you pay. Sometimes my answer is: don't.

What you can do with this tomorrow

Short and practical, for the maker or organiser reading this:

• Walk through your own shopfront. Every photo and every line that could just as easily belong to someone else: out. Replace it with something from your own work this year.
• Shoot one thing yourself. Your workspace, your hands, the set-up at seven in the morning. That image exists nowhere else.
• List what happens backstage. Quotes, email, invoices, calendar. Write down how many hours a week it takes. That number is your real bill.
• Only then, calculate. What are you paying now for those hours and those subscriptions — and what is left once the work behind the scenes runs on its own?

The menu on the wall stays yours. The hassle behind it can go.