Fake Advertising

    It's not uncommon for small-time vendors and food stands and stuff to have branding that is cobbled together from random sources. So you'll have a carwash or a pizzeria that has a photoshopped Mario as its mascot. I find this phenomenon to be charming, I think we end up with off-brand versions of characters that look bad in a really funny way.

    Some while ago I stumbled upon this ice cream shop that had a sign with the seven dwarves on it. It was the Disney version of the dwarves, based on the 1937 designs for them. But there was something else about them. They looked like 3D models, and something about the colors and the lighting looked very familiar. After looking at them for a few seconds, I clocked them as being renders from Kingdom Hearts, Birth by Sleep to be specific.

Recreated from memory

    That was a couple years ago, in the summer of 2023. Last summer, in 2025, I was walking past another ice cream vendor when I looked at their sign. It had an image of a child eating ice cream on it. After looking at it for a second, I thought to myself: This child... ...is not... ...real...

    It was like that scene from Superman, where Superman is stuck in a dream dimension and talking to his fake imaginary son and he's like "I'm sorry son, it's just... I don't think you're real..."


    It's a painfully tragic scene where Superman loses his entire family and planet that he thought he had for 40 years in an instant. So you know, basically the same as realizing some random ice cream vendor has AI images on their sign.

    Seriously though, it's just really annoying that AI abominations are starting to replace manmade abominations that at least had some thought and effort put into them. And it's bad for us as customers too. Not only are the images not of the actual food that is being served, they're of food that has never existed at any point in history.

Comments

  1. monomaloFebruary 2, 2026 at 4:12 PM

    i love manmade abominations. i've also seen many of these type of signs (and i love the real good ice cream one you recreated from memory, its so funny, i hope it was exactly like that) but my favorite thing has to be knock off merch. i used to have this beach towel with the the powerpuff girls in it but they had radioactive orange, brown and purple dresses, and they had the original hairstyles but they switched the colors so buttercup was blonde, blossom had black hair and bubbles was a redhead. and i still own to this day my hola gatita (hello kitty in spanish) plushie, she's wrong in so many ways, i love her sm. the thought of someone designing a terrible version of something that already exists makes me so happy. AI could never curate those vibes.

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