Santa Cruz restaurant changes logo after flurry of negative reviews for AI art

I run a Reddit group. Someone thought a fantasy book cover was AI art, and everyone piled on, talked crap, attacked the author, etc. Turns out 100% human by a well-known artist.

We had to make a rule against AI witch hunts. It brings out the worst in humans.

This isn’t just a story about an AI logo, it’s a story about locals who feel the business they frequented was replaced by someone trying to make a quick buck.

And an owner who believes that means the locals want to “destroy” her business.

Im not choosing a side, but it doesn’t seem like they have a strong future with or without a logo. That’s just Santa Cruz culture, very aggro surfers.

Many of the surrounding restaurants are very immersed in local surf culture and put a great deal of resources and effort into their decor.

a lot of people on here are going to instantly defend any AI use in spite of the specifics but the over-abundance of blatant diffusion model art in cost-cutting nowadays, in places where it isn’t even expected, is ridiculous. marketing is by no means the peak of artistic endeavor but genai logos for small business street taco vendors, coffee shops reek of laziness. never mind the inundation of places like Etsy and Redbubble where it is getting increasingly less possible to find stuff made with human intention. shades of the anti-materialism of the 90s: now consumer products are all just generated, never made.

there is this coffee shop in downtown Seattle, Artly coffee, that operates on this gimmick of serving robot-produced coffee. a 20 year old employee hangs in the back to essentially do nothing and sit on their phone. it is a silly experience worth trying once, but no more. Coffee by itself is already a cross section into the hyperindustrial production that has informed the trajectory of our lives since before being born, but i feel regardless there are such things that are a step too far

There are so many automated processes in a restaurant, starting from machine pressed building materials that took a livelihood away from honest human woodworkers and carpenters. Someone please help me understand why this reaction isn't just the latest form of Ludditism (Luddism?) that'll naturally fade away as time passes.

> One remaining one-star review on Google reads, “Their logo is AI generated, if they can’t make the effort to create a logo they definitely won’t make the effort to cook good food.”

I'm not sure what it's called, but there has to be a name for this logical error.

99 Bottles was never a beloved pub.

I understand and even agree with these sentiments, but in the back of my head is a voice which says "artists have been copying and even stealing from one another since there has been art - what is it that makes this different?"

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How out of touch these owners are.