Latest news with #ShrimpJesus
San Francisco Chronicle
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
This maximalist new S.F. restaurant served our critic one of her favorite dishes of the year
When I was an editor at Bon Appétit, many of our most popular recipes followed a simple formula: It's this, but it's also that. It's an apple cider doughnut, but it's also cake. It's French onion soup, but it's Taiwanese beef noodle soup too. The appeal is obvious — why settle for one delicious thing when you can have two — and there is a certain type of gonzo recipe developer whose brain is naturally wired for this genre of culinary innovation. They're not the people who will spend months perfecting a classic recipe for, say, Bavarian pretzels. They're maximalists. They're going to ask hard questions like, what if Bavarian pretzels and jerk chicken had a baby? Parker Brown is that type of chef. At his new San Francisco restaurant, Side A, the menu is riddled with unholy alliances that, like Shrimp Jesus, are undeniably compelling. 'I like fried potatoes with cheese,' you think, 'and I like fried potatoes with caviar. Why wouldn't I like both smashed together?' This is not to say Side A is a restaurant that runs on AI slop-style gimmicks. After getting his start in restaurants in his native Chicago, Brown moved west to train under Michael Mina and, most recently, was chef de cuisine at Aphotic, the Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant that closed at the end of last year. His chops are real, his flavors are dialed, his technique is unimpeachable. Take the short rib gnocchi ($34). It's an Italian beef sandwich, but it's also pillowy, beautifully-seared pâte à choux dumplings. It's one of the best dishes I've eaten all year. The Parisian gnocchi swim in an impossibly rich sauce made with veal stock, but in every bite you'll encounter a burst of brightness from the house-pickled giardiniera. Fresh goat cheese from Tomales Farmstead Creamery adds tang, and the whole soupy, beefy mess is blanketed with microplaned Parm and finely chopped chives. There's also the chicken cutlet ($36), a buttermilk-brined breast coated with panko and cornflakes that gives schnitzel the golden arches treatment. The pounded cutlet, topped with a mountain of herbs, rises out of a sea of positively slurpable honey mustard sauce, thinned with chicken jus. It's McNuggets' final form. The sole element that distracted from nostalgic bliss was the braised chicories, a pleasantly bitter but texturally reminiscent of hot, wet salad. Breaking the mold is Side A's halibut ($39). Neither cute nor clever, it's simply delicious, a mature combination of beans, charred onions, fish and salsa macha. Brown obviously delights in the over-the-top playfulness of his other menu items, but the halibut sends a message. He doesn't need a 'concept' to sell a dish. If all this sounds like a far cry from the type of foam and edible flower-flecked food Brown cooked at Aphotic, that's by design. For Brown, fine dining was a job, one he happened to be very good at. It was never a passion. A former high school athlete, Brown worked as a strength and conditioning coach before making the jump to restaurants. 'Coming from a sports background, it was an easy transition to fine dining,' he told me. 'It's competitive, semi-egotistical. Very translatable.' But at Side A, the focus is not on chasing stars but rather, in Brown's words, yumminess. You may have student debt and borderline LDL levels, but what does your inner child crave? Definitely that large format chicken tender, but maybe a salad as well — specifically the garbage salad ($25), a composition that is as much jammy egg, smoked blue cheese, candied pecans and crispy pork belly confit as it is vegetables. For dessert, there's carrot cake ($18), an only barely scaled-down version of the one that Brown and his wife, Caroline, who mans Side A's DJ booth several nights a week, served at their wedding. Two people will struggle to finish it. Brown will assure you that the leftovers will be excellent the next morning with a cup of coffee, a fact to which I can attest. Perhaps this is because it's generously showered with toasted coconut and candied walnuts, essentially granola. If you weren't tipped off to Side A's Midwestern sensibilities by the Italian beef and Miller High Life on the menu, then the portion sizes might clue you in. And if the portion sizes weren't evidence enough, then the warmth of the Browns is a giveaway. 'We're huggers,' they might tell you on a second visit. The Browns set out to open a neighborhood restaurant for them and their community. If you're there, well, then you must be a friend. On my visits, my fellow diners seemed primed by that Midwestern geniality — as well as by their good fortune at having secured a tough reservation — to have a convivial time. This is no silent temple to tweezer food. Caroline, a music industry veteran, and her guest DJs pull from a deep selection of vinyl, spinning Peter Gabriel and the Police for a Father's Day dad rock set and mixing D'Angelo and Biggie later in the evening. The Browns have added sound-absorbing panels to the walls of the old Universal Café space, but it's still not the place to have a quiet tête-à-tête. Bring a date you'd like to lean closer to. Brown's maximalist swings uniformly delight, but they don't all hit their mark. While I do love both burgers and bone marrow, it turns out that I don't find them to bring out the best in one another, particularly when a luscious soft-ripened slab of goat cheese is also invited to the party ($35). With pickles and a ramekin of jus on the side, figuring out how to eat it gracefully is an intelligence test I was not bright enough to pass. And although I had high hopes for that appetizer of cheese fries bedazzled with two types of caviar ($39), it was also a challenge to eat — it's hard to balance roe on a French fry while swiping it through Mornay sauce — and somehow less than the sum of its parts. But while eating that more-is-more cheeseburger, I was reminded of my high school theater director who encouraged his actors to make big choices. 'I'd rather have too much to work with than not enough,' he'd say. Brown's ideas are bold, his cooking confident, and the space he and Caroline have created is vivacious and inviting. It's a yummy restaurant, but it's also a house party filled with nice people. Sounds like a recipe for popularity to me. Side A 2814 19th St., San Francisco. Meal for two, without drinks: $95-$150 Drinks: A large selection of wines by the glass, including a house white and red that are collaborations with Ryme Cellars ($13 glass, $49 bottle); rotating draft selection as well as the Champagne of Beers ($6); N/A options including housemade lemonades ($8) Best practices: Expect more of a party vibe on Fridays and Saturdays and a slightly more mellow situation Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday. If no reservations are available, walking in is possible, but prepare to wait.
Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
This corny ‘conservative credit card' ad signals a very scary future for AI
A fresh glimpse at our AI-filled future arrived this week, in the form of an unmemorable ad by a company most people have never heard of. The ad is kind of flat and will probably scan as goofy to everyone outside its target demo, but don't write it off just yet: It could signal the beginning of some very big (and scary) changes. Why you're catching the 'ick' so easily, according to science Waymo is winning in San Francisco Supersonic air travel gets green light in U.S. after 50-year ban lifted The upstart fintech company Coign claims to be a 'conservative credit card company,' a distinction that boils down to the founders' pledge to never donate to liberal causes and candidates. And while that self-definition raises some questions, it pales in comparison to the actual ad. The 30-second clip is a patriotic parade of red-blooded, red-voting Americans boasting about recent Coign-fueled purchases such as deer-hunting gear, a stack of cartoonish gold bars, and the 'biggest American flag' available. But here's the most striking thing about the ad: All of those situations, and all of the actors, were created by AI. There's something a little off about Coign's ad, to be clear. The pacing of the phony satisfied customers' movements feels too jittery at times, and there's an eagle at the end that is not exactly natural looking. While the ad is spiritually the same AI slop as Shrimp Jesus, it doesn't carry the same overtly synthetic visuals. In that regard, it's a lot more casually AI-generated than many of its predecessor ads. When Coca-Cola released an AI-generated holiday spot last fall, it sparked an uproar. Creatives were livid about such a monumentally successful company neglecting to splash out on an all-human production, and even casual observers noticed the glaring flaws in the video: The truck's tires glided over the ground without spinning, Santa's hand was bizarrely out of proportion with the Coke bottle it gripped, and the entire ad sat squarely in the 'uncanny valley.' The same goes for the ad Toys R Us released last year using OpenAI's text-to-video tool Sora: The kindest thing one could say is that its human characters looked marginally more lifelike than the unsettling, motion-captured Tom Hanks from The Polar Express two decades earlier. So far, AI-generated ads have been rare enough and mostly the domain of heavy-hitter companies, making them lightning rods for attention and backlash just about every time a new one is released. The simple fact that they were AI-made has been enough to generate headlines, even before factoring in the slop. But maybe not for much longer. If the Coign ad is any indication, there may be an entire class of AI ads coming that will be subject to far less attention—and far less scrutiny. We're at a precarious moment with AI, collectively feeling out its least objectionable uses through trial and error. So far, uncanny ads from massive companies have triggered backlash, but when lesser-known brands dabble—especially without obvious visual glitches—they often escape notice. Advertising legend David Droga once noted the existence of a 'mediocre middle' in marketing and entertainment, and that may be exactly where AI quietly thrives: in ads from companies too small to spark outrage. Advertising, after all, is already the most disposable and least emotionally protected form of media—expensive to make, widely avoided, and largely unloved. That makes it the perfect Trojan horse for AI—slipping past scrutiny not because it's good, but because few people care enough to notice. On a moral and economic level, the advertising industry should not be diving headlong into a technology that makes large swaths of professional workers expendable. And on an aesthetic level, just because AI technically can create an ad doesn't mean it can create a good one. Once a seemingly harmless use case eases people's minds about a given technological breakthrough, it's only a matter of time before the more flagrantly objectionable use cases take hold. The facial recognition tech that first allowed Facebook users to tag their friends in photos was eventually used to strengthen the surveillance state and threaten privacy everywhere. Today's drones that make aerial photography easier become tomorrow's drones that mistakenly blow up weddings in other countries and threaten to displace delivery workers. Obviously, AI is going to play some role in humanity's future. The size of that role, however, is not yet set in stone. As machine learning creeps into all creative fields, workers need regulations to ensure the technology doesn't spread too far too fast. The good news is that a majority of Americans seem to want AI regulation. Although the House of Representatives recently passed a major tax and spending bill with a provision forbidding state governments to regulate AI over the next 10 years, that clause is getting bipartisan blowback. According to a recent poll, 81% of voters agree that 'advances in AI are exciting but also bring risks, and in such fast-moving times, we shouldn't force states to sit on the sidelines for a full decade.' Even the CEO of generative AI company Anthropic is a full-throated advocate for stricter AI regulation. The people have spoken. Whether they are listened to is another matter altogether. A single, silly credit card ad may seem an unlikely step toward a dystopian future of unfettered AI and full unemployment, but if we laugh it off now, the bill may still come due later. This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter: Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Bloomberg
03-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Mark Zuckerberg's AI Slop Will Make Ads Creepier and Worse
Shrimp Jesus until now has been one of the internet's strangest artificial-intelligence fever dreams. The likeness of the Christian figurehead fused with crustaceans started going viral on Facebook last year, epitomizing the rise of 'AI slop' or images generated by tools like ChatGPT, graphics that millions of social media users have inexplicably liked and shared. Mark Zuckerberg has lapped it up. In recent months, he's given a string of podcast interviews describing social feeds that will be filled with AI content and AI friends. And fueling this synthetic future will be AI ads, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported Monday that Meta Platforms Inc. will offer tools for advertisers to create ads with artificial intelligence, corroborating Zuckerberg's own hints on the matter. One day, Shrimp Jesus might try to pitch you on a local seafood restaurant. This has set off palpitations at ad agencies. Who needs the expertise of today's Mad Men if Meta's tools not only target users but also do all the creative work of building adverts from scratch? Shares in WPP Plc, a British advertising giant, fell 3% in London trading on Monday after the Journal published its report and remained flat on Tuesday in a rising stock market.
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Did the Internet Die in 2016? There's an Online Community That Thinks So
I've got two words for you: Shrimp Jesus. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's the infamous AI-generated Facebook image of Shrimp Jesus and other variations floating around the internet. That image first surfaced in March 2024 and appeared to be a meme at first glance. However, Shrimp Jesus was the jumping-off point for Facebook AI art slop. These consist of newly AI-generated memes sweeping the internet, such as the Challah Horse, the 386-year-old granny baking her own birthday cake and the random wooden cars, just to name a few. You might think these are just memes, but these images reignite discussions surrounding an old online conspiracy called the Dead Internet Theory, which began in 2021. As someone who writes about the internet for a living, this was the first time I'd heard of this idea, and researching it led me down a bottomless rabbit hole from which I struggled to emerge. But if you frequently use TikTok, Instagram or Facebook, you might have unwittingly already seen examples online that echo this premise. So, what is the Dead Internet Theory, and how does it parallel the rise of artificial intelligence? The Dead Internet Theory first emerged in 2021 on the online forums, 4chan and Wizardchan. People took to these forums claiming that the internet died in 2016 and that AI bots mostly run the content we now see online. This theory also supports the possibility that AI is being used to manipulate the public due to a much larger and sinister agenda. These posts were pieced together in a lengthy thread and published on another online forum called Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe. Be aware, the thread can be easily accessed online, but I did not link to it due to the obscene language in the post. User IlluminatiPirate wrote, 'The internet feels empty and devoid of people. It is also devoid of content.' Now, years later, this conspiracy is seeing the light of day again with a rise of TikTok creators dissecting the theory and finding examples to support it. One creator, with a username of SideMoneyTom, posted a video in March 2024, showing examples of different Facebook accounts posting variations of AI-generated images of Jesus. These images provide little traffic online, yet they can still easily proliferate your feed. Like many other online creators, SideMoneyTom echoed the same sentiment: These Facebook accounts are run by AI bots and create all content. To better understand this theory, it helps to know how generative AI works. Generative AI uses artificial intelligence systems that produce new content in the form of stories, images, videos, music and even software code. According to Monetate, 'Generative AI uses machine-learning algorithms and training data to generate new, plausibly human-passing content.' With the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, chatbots have become all the rage these days, with tech giants like Google, Apple and MetaAI creating a slew of AI tools for their products. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) Now, back to Shrimp Jesus. If you feed specific data and prompts to a chatbot, you'll find that these images are 'human-passing.' Emphasis on 'passing.' Content created by chatbots is certainly known to have its faults. "While large pre-trained systems such as LLMs [large language models] have made impressive advancements in their reasoning capabilities, more research is needed to guarantee correctness and depth of the reasoning performed by them,' AI experts wrote in a report by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. However, Shrimp Jesus and other AI-generated images aren't the only things online believers use to substantiate this theory. If you spend enough time on social media, you'll see odd things in the comments section of certain posts, like repetitive comments from accounts that are irrelevant to the post. These comments are often strange and don't make sense. Last winter, Bluesky subscribers took to Reddit to complain about being plagued by reply bots that were politely and annoyingly argumentative. One user flagged the common signs to spot these reply bots and what to do when encountering them. Some indications you're experiencing a bot are when the account is new and has many replies to different posts, as seen from this Bluesky reply bot account. According to Imperva's 2024 Bad Bot Report, nearly half of all internet traffic came from bots in 2023, a 2% increase from the year prior. That report also highlights that the rapid adoption of generative AI and other LLMs has increased simple bots. AI's growth has accelerated in recent years, but so have the fears and concerns surrounding these changes. According to recent data from the Pew Research Center, AI experts were more likely than Americans to believe that AI will positively impact the US in the next 20 years. Data shows that over 47% of experts are excited about using AI daily, versus 11% of the public. That same report also highlights that over 51% of US adults have been concerned about the growth of AI since 2021. Regarding the growing concerns over whether the internet is dead, Sofie Hvitved, technology futurist and senior advisor at the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies, believes that the internet is not dead, but evolving. 'I think the internet, as it looks like now, will die, but it has been dying for a long time, in that sense,' Hvitved said. 'It's transforming into something else and decomposing itself into a new thing, so we have to figure out how to make new solutions and better algorithms… making it better and more relevant to us as humans.' In 2024, a NewsGuard audit report revealed that generative AI tools were used to spread Russian propaganda in over 3.6 million articles. NewsGuard also found that AI chatbots were used to create false narratives online from a Russian misinformation news site. To that point, Hvitved emphasized that these issues stemming from AI do not signify that the internet is dead but instead force us to address how we can improve these AI tools. 'Since there are large language models, and you know, AI feeds on all the information it can gather, it can start polluting the LLMs and pollute the data, which is a huge problem,' said Hvitved. The Dead Internet Theory isn't dying anytime soon, no pun intended. Online discourse surrounding this theory isn't limited to the TikTok community but has also found a home on multiple Reddit threads. One Reddit user wrote, 'AI chatbots are going to be catastrophic for so many people's mental health.' Another posted, 'Considering that we are just at the beginning of AI, especially its capabilities with video, I'd say there's a real chance that it will destroy the usefulness of the internet and make it dead.' Other people echo the same sentiment by adding that the ratio of AI content to human content will change dramatically over the next few years. One even compiled a list of over 130 examples of subreddit threads on the internet, which consisted of comments and posts generated by AI bots. One looming question following the Dead Internet Theory is whether AI will completely replace human-made content. If so, how will this shape internet culture? Hvitved is also the Head of Media at the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies and specializes in examining the relationship between emerging technologies like AI and their impact on communication. She has a take on the future of a new internet culture as AI use increases. 'Maybe the static element of the internet is going to die. So we have articles, static pages and web pages you must scroll through, but is that the death of the internet? I don't think so.' She believes this new internet culture could mean more relevant content for broadband users. 'That kind of contextual internet, knowledge graphs, real-time summaries and interactive microformats, that's something these [AI] agents can go out and pick from to create something specialized for you.' This new internet culture will emphasize AI's ability to tailor unique content for each user and may mean abandoning the concept of shared spaces and communities. 'We have to pay attention to echo chambers or diving into your own little worlds that only you would understand. We won't have any shared reality anymore,' Hvitved said. If you've watched films like The Terminator, Blade Runner or Wall-E, you know there's always been a fascination with robots and whether they will take over the world one day. The resurgence of the Dead Internet Theory is just the latest evidence of that ongoing discourse. One could argue that AI shaping a new internet culture would mean the death of the internet as we know it. But this doesn't imply that the internet will just disappear. To echo what AI expert Sofie Hvitved conveyed, the internet may eventually evolve into something new. With the rapid growth of AI in our day-to-day lives, there's no question this is transforming the digital landscape. But is the internet dead? As a broadband writer working with numerous hard-working CNET writers daily, I can testify that it's alive. The Dead Internet Theory emerged in 2021 from online conspiracy theorists on forums like 4chan and Wizardchan. It suggests that the internet died in 2016 and that the content we see online is run mainly by AI bots. The Dead internet Theory also suggests that AI is being used to manipulate the public due to a much larger and sinister creators note the increased number of Facebook bot accounts creating AI-generated images, with Shrimp Jesus and other variations of this image being the most infamous. This image also became the jumping point for Facebook AI art slop to spread online, with newly generated AI memes like the Challah Horse, the 386-year-old granny baking their own birthday cake, and the random wooden cars. In addition, followers also ascribe to this theory due to the spread of bot accounts filling the comment sections across different social media platforms. Generative AI uses artificial intelligence systems to create new content, including stories, images, videos, music and software code. The way it works is you feed specific prompts and data to a chatbot, and it creates a particular output for you. Examples of generative AI include chatbots like ChatGPT, Preplexity, Google Gemini and Claude by Anthropic -- a CNET Editors' Choice for the best overall AI chatbot.
