Okay I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and here's my "I'm currently drinking my coffee" take on this. I'm willing to be significantly wrong here, but for the sake of discussion, here's where I think I'm at.

I also agree with

> I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well.

But I also really hate these menus, I see them all the time as well. I think that my conclusion is slightly different than yours: in my opinion, just not a lot of people have taste. That's sort of like, true by the definition of taste, but what I mean is something more specific: it's not because of AI that I dislike these signs. It's because of what you said above:

> producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.

While it looks like a huge improvement to them, it does not to me. Our tastes differ.

Here's a version of this that doesn't involve AI at all: last night I ate sushi at a place I'd never been before. Their menu was a bit chaotic, and had a bunch of annotations, along with a guide to those annotations. One section had both "2" and "2 pieces" listed under the options, and so I was confused: what was the difference here? Turns out it's basically just a typo, both mean that. Combine that with some spelling mistakes, and yeah, I had a pretty bad impression of the menu. The sushi was fine though, I'd go back. But this wasn't a super low-end place, so the attention to detail being off made me a bit worried before I actually ate the food.

Same problem, same issue, AI is really the only variable here. And it is the natural downside of "democratization" or "helping more people do more things", naturally, there will be a lot more low-quality stuff out there than before. That's not actually inherently a bad thing. But it can feel weird.