Taking a good looking picture of food is not actually all that easy, professionals earn(ed) a lot of money doing it.

That said i 100% prefer a casual real picture over the promotional art in a menu. I want to see what i am getting and i mean prefer it over the professional photo. Ai food looks absolutely disgusting.

I imagine many of them have vision so deteriorated that they literally can’t see the difference. And I will remind you, these people are still allowed to drive.

Eh, that's more cynical than what I mean. I'm not trying to insult older folks, not their health nor intelligence.

I was talking more about psycological 'perception,' assuming their vision is sharp, or they have reading glasses on or whatever. My observaton is their brain tends to operate more on 'autopilot,' even among remarkably smart older folks, so perhaps they're more inclined to miss 'uncanny valley' things like this until someone points it out and they really focus on the picture's details.

Most restaurants don't even have a picture of the food, especially when the menu is really simple like this.

I mean honestly I’ve ordered plenty of food from text only menus and relied on ingredient descriptions to help me decide. I’m only disappointed when they give me something that is very against the platonic ideal of whatever they described. (I’m sorry but deep fried scones are a step too far away from egg battered bread for me to call it French toast)

Vision can be fine at certain sight distance and not fine at others. That may make them perfectly fine to drive but to miss fine details. This happens frequently with near and far sighted people.

I can't see granular details anymore without glasses but that doesn't affect my driving at all (granular details being font at sizes like 4 point). I used to be able to read it without problems, but as I have aged it's not something I can do anymore.

Stock fotos. Cost a bit, but look great.

If you want to be cheap, just don't show the food. That's what the penny pinchers used to do before the advent of clip art; print out a bare list of meals on the cheapest colored paper they could find.

If they were feeling really fancy, they'd laminate it and be uncomfortably insistent about getting it back.

Much of social media these days is starting from "old people bad", and working backwards from there. Including accusations that it's only old people on Facebook engaging in nonsense. Absolutely no self awareness there at all.

It's a necessary evil in my country, and most of the local businesses I deal with are on FB. Half the time the content is really engagement garbage.

From what I have seen, it’s bottom-barrel diffusion/LLM generated engagement farming. Thirst posts, political ragebait, AI Jesus, trippy nonsense; basically anything to farm likes, which users apparently like in aggregate.

It’s notably more obvious than most social media. It’s even more obvious than Instagram, with its flood of bot influencers linking to autogenerated OnlyFans pages/chats.

On top of this, it’s basically the only place Meta can push Muse, as there is little interest in it elsewhere.

When I gave up Reddit cold turkey for APIpocalypse, I started browsing Facebook as mindless scrolling content.

And yes, I know, it's worse than Reddit for a lot of reasons.

There's a ton of AI slop on it. Los of repost bots. Lots of low effort culture war nonsense.

Outside of good Facebook groups, it's mostly straight garbage. But, I kinda appreciate being able to see what the normies are seeing.