404 Media recently did a report on the use of AI-generated images as food illustrations on DoorDash and other food delivery services. InstaCart has also been making algorithmically suggested recipe suggestions with uncanny illustrations. The restaurants most likely to use fake pictures of fake food seem to be ghost kitchens — restaurants that exist only as a brand on a delivery site, operating out of the back of a different restaurant. There are more than a few in my city, like “Send Noods,” a delivery-only joint run from the kitchen of a Korean sushi place. (It sends noodles. Get it?)
Their judgement:
This is all incredibly depressing. A local pizzeria can’t get by unless it makes sandwiches for ghost kitchen brands, the people who make a living taking photographs of food are being displaced by AI tools, and gigantic food delivery apps are still making money by taking a cut from restaurants and screwing over gig delivery drivers.
It’s not good, it’s not accurate, but it’s good enough to be a vague illustration, good enough for a glance if you don’t look closely, if you’re not counting on the product you buy to match the picture on the menu. And who is? We all know food photography is fake anyway. This is just faker and cheaper, just like shitty fast fashion gets you an outfit that’s half as good for a third of the price, and it works OK as long as you don’t think too hard about the pollution, the exploitative labor practices, the millions of coal-fired GPUs churning away to produce the gray goo that passes for “content” these days.
More Bad News
In Oklahoma, where anti-trans and anti-gay rhetoric and laws have been among the most aggressively poisonous, a 10th grader named Nex Benedict has died. One day they were fine. The next day, they were beaten into unconsciousness for not dressing the right way. The day after that, they were dead. Everyone’s in full coverup mode. Coverage from Slate and The Cut has some disagreement about details, but both sources agree that the full story won’t be known for some time, if ever. What does it mean? What kinds of behavior are allowed and tolerated and encouraged at every level to produce a situation where a fifteen year old is dead after a fight in a high school bathroom? Just another pointless death that folks like Chaya Raichik claim they didn’t intend to inspire.
Meanwhile:
- The New Republic on the red-state brain drain.
- Texas Monthly profiles a billionaire pastor driving Texas politics ever rightward.
Good News/Bad Opinions
In Hoboken, New Jersey, adjustments to traffic enforcement and parking have resulted in a remarkable record: no traffic deaths on city-controlled streets in seven years. The major changes were narrowing intersections to slow traffic, and “daylighting,” or preventing cars from parking right next to a corner, which improves visibility. Noted conservative intellectual Jordan Peterson responded to AP News coverage of this milestone on Twitter with outrage:
Two Excellent Pieces of Film Criticism
An exploration of Dune Part Two, and the ways in which it both subverts and supports the Chosen Hero narrative, which it gives the rather unfortunate but not entirely inaccurate nickname magic dick theory:
In Dune, though? It’s all a con. There is no benevolent higher power.
The connection between patrilineal inheritance, male heterosexuality, and just governance is not a fact of nature; it’s a convenient fiction. The prophecy that makes the Fremen accept Paul as the savior figure… was planted in Fremen culture generations ago… It’s a plainly imperialist fiction designed to exploit an indigenous population, and it works.
A very good meditation on the 1989 film Do The Right Thing, art criticism, and the kinds of violence that make us feel safe:
I think the reaction to Do the Right Thing revealed that the burning of a white-owned pizzeria and a fight over inclusion represented violence that scared white audiences, while a persistent police presence in a Black neighborhood that might at any moment turn into the murder of a resident of that neighborhood did not represent violence that made white people feel scared. It might have even been the sort of violence that made many white people feel safe. In fact, most of the talk by mostly white pundits and audiences didn’t even seem to acknowledge the act of policing on Black neighborhoods to be violence at all.
Like I said, sometimes when people talk about art, the art starts talking about them.
Joy
The old-school comic strip Nancy has been running since the 1930s, but has had something of a resurgence since the latest artist, Olivia Jaimes, took the helm in 2018. Two recent gems: one about the transcendence of art, and pondering the eternal question “is that all there is?”
Also:
Secretly Ironic 