Dear Local Lubbock Restaurants:

I know you have a lot on your plate (literally and figuratively). You wear many hats: business owner, chef, and sometimes, in a pinch, you probably even step into the dish pit. In addition to all that, you must market your business if you want people to remember you're around. And  I know it's tempting to take the easiest, quickest way, but it is far from the best.

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Please understand the following comes from a place of love and passion for local food. I am your biggest fan, and I want you to succeed, but....

I Don't Want To See AI Images Of Fake Food

And most of your customers don't want to, either. I'm not here to discuss the ethics of using AI, I am here to say that AI images of food "give me the ick" in a major way. It looks unnatural and grosses me out. It is referred to as "slop" for a reason.

AI images of food also don't show your customers what you are actually selling. It diminishes trust. Why are you not showing me what your actual hamburger looks like? Is it small, gross, or is your business a weird scam? All valid questions when you appear to be hiding something.

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There's No Excuse, And The Alternative Is Better

In the time it took you to put in a prompt on ChatGPT, you could have just snapped a photo of your actual food. You have a professional-quality camera right there on your phone.

And as a moderator of a local food group that has over 95,000 members, I can tell you from experience that people are more likely to react to pictures of real food than to weird cartoon eggs or whatever. I am no professional, but I've snapped photos of food that had several dozen people asking when and where to get the same plate. Here's an example that's not the best photo, but it had people talking:

Nothing fancy there- just my delicious food from Lubbock Hibachi Express. This photo got over 100 reactions and 37 comments- many of which were folks saying they went because they saw the photo or that they were planning to. Here's a second example:

Literally just the person sitting next to me holding up their burger, and I know you want to lean in and take a bite.

An Easy, Inexpensive Professional Tool

Want to add some professional looking grahics, borders, etc to your image? Canva has a free tier and is otherwise pretty inexpensive. It's also easy to learn. You can make very professional-looking posts with images of your actual food, actual location, and actual staff and customers, and your posts will benefit from it, I promise.

In conclusion, if you are smart enough, capable enough, and hard-working enough to own your own business (hint: you are), then you are perfectly capable of creating quality posts for social media without using icky-looking AI images. You've got this, and I believe in you.