Megi Endeladze never expected to be at the center of an AI backlash.
She and her husband opened Penny’s Coffee Shop in downtown Buffalo, New York three years ago. Endeladze kept her 9-to-5 as a chiropractor while spending her free time helping out in the shop.
One of the duties she relished was photographing the drinks and menu items, including a few signature items like a cheesy bread dish from their native country, Georgia, for their social media channels and website.
Penny’s Coffee Shop would switch seasonal drinks every few months, and Endeladze would photograph the new items herself, and it would end up being a full-day event. “You have to time it so the foam doesn’t deflate,” Endeladze explained to Business Insider.
Then, one of the more artistically gifted baristas would create a chalkboard sign for the new drink menus or promotional specials. Over the years, there had been several employees skilled with lettering and design, and the duty had always rotated among them, always done in-house.
But this fall, the aesthetically inclined barista who most recently chalked the signs had moved out of town, Endelaydsze said, and there was no one on staff at the moment who had the skill set to do a chalkboard. So Endelaydsze decided to get a poster printed up instead. She considered doing what she has done in the past: taking her own photos and editing them together with Canva. But with a newborn baby, she figured she could save herself some time and do it with AI.
“I felt like a genius, and made posters using AI and frame them,” she told me. ‘Not knowing how much damage it would cause my coffee shop.”
She used ChatGPT to make an image of the menu, and got the poster professionally printed up for around $150. She also bought a plastic poster holder that cost around $200.
Then, she posted a photo of the new menu sign to Instagram. Very soon, the negative comments started rolling in:
“AI Slop.”
“Really a shame honestly.”
“Yikes.”
“SHAME SHAME SHAME.”
Angry DMs, including a threat
“Penny’s customer — or I guess ex-customer now,” started one DM. “I’m sorry it came to this, but AI is a hard no for me.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose to upset anybody, especially customers,” Endeladze told me. “In Buffalo, where we are, it’s a lot of artistic community and all that. I didn’t even think of that like that.”
She was up during the night pumping for her three-month-old baby and was scrolling through the comments and DMs, horrified.
“At 4 a.m., I was holding my pump on my lap and replying to this person, ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it that way,'” she told me. “I was so into typing this message that I produced so much milk, it was dripping down my legs because I overflowed the pump.”
She noticed she had lost about 100 followers — some of whom told her as much before they unfollowed.
Then came a threat. An account with a much larger following DM’d her and told her to take down the sign, or they would post about it to their local artist community. The person offered to help her find an artist to pay to make a new sign, or else they would post about it.
They gave her a day to “think about it.”
Instagram / Megi Endeladze
‘There is a real person behind this small business’
Endeladze posted a follow-up to Instagram to apologize, saying that she had decided the coffee shop would not use AI for menu artwork or promo designs.
But she also urged her customers to approach the topic with “kindness and respect.”
“What has been difficult for me, however, is the amount of negativity, personal attacks, and messages that followed this situation,” she wrote. “There is a real person behind this small business. I am doing my best to run a local coffee shop, support my team, serve our community, and navigate being a new mom at the same time.”
Penny’s Coffee Shop isn’t the only business that has experienced some backlash when using AI.
A bagel shop owner in Vermont got vitriolic comments when he used AI images to promote the shop on Instagram. Recently, images of delis using AI to make signs and menus, sometimes with freakish results, have gone viral online.
Endeladyze said she felt terrible that she had upset her customers, but she was also frustrated at the idea that she should have been paying a real artist. Making these signs was a job only she had done herself or with employees in the past, never hiring outsiders.
“I was just tired of thanking people for sending me all these artists locally, all these girls who do other coffee shop posters. Then I had to politely be like, ‘Okay, thank you so much. I will look into them.’ I didn’t want to be like, ‘I can do it myself.’ And I will do it myself. Next time around, I will do it with Canva myself. I’ve done it for three whole years.”
