Business
(VIDEO) Al-Ittihad Fans Taunt Cristiano Ronaldo With Messi Chants As Al-Nassr Suffers First Loss
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Cristiano Ronaldo endured a forgettable performance and a chorus of taunts from home supporters Saturday as Al-Nassr suffered its first defeat of the season, falling 2-1 to rival club Al-Ittihad in the Saudi Pro League.
Al-Nassr had won all four of its league matches under new manager Ange Postecoglou before Saturday’s loss to one of its main title rivals. Nigerian striker George Ilenikhena scored twice for Al-Ittihad, while former Chelsea winger Angelo Gabriel provided Al-Nassr’s lone goal. Ronaldo, playing in front of the Al-Ittihad crowd, failed to register a goal or an assist and was taunted by home supporters as the match neared its conclusion.
Al-Ittihad fans repeatedly chanted the name of Lionel Messi, Ronaldo’s longtime rival, during the closing stages of the victory, a jab widely understood to be directed squarely at Ronaldo despite the two players themselves having maintained a relatively cordial relationship off the field over the years.
The chants continued a long-running tradition among Al-Ittihad supporters specifically, and Saudi Pro League crowds more broadly, of invoking Messi’s name whenever Ronaldo’s Al-Nassr faces defeat in the kingdom. Given that Messi has generally been favored in the broader public debate over which of the two players stands as the greatest of all time, fans have frequently reached for his name as a pointed insult toward Ronaldo during difficult moments in his Saudi Arabian career.
Ronaldo did not publicly react to Saturday’s chants, though observers noted he surely would have heard them given their volume and persistence throughout the closing stages of the match. At one point during the game, Ronaldo attempted to read a note passed along by Al-Ittihad’s coaching staff to his former Portugal national team teammate, Danilo Pereira, who now plays for Al-Ittihad, with the two sharing a laugh over the odd moment despite being on opposing sides.
Al-Ittihad’s official English-language social media account took its own direct shot at Ronaldo following the match, posting a message mocking the Portuguese superstar.
“Cheating and still losing!” the club’s account wrote in a post accompanying video from the match, tagging the hashtag associated with the fixture between the two clubs.
Saturday’s defeat marked far from the first time Ronaldo has faced Messi-themed taunts from Al-Ittihad supporters since his move to Saudi Arabia. In a previous meeting between the two clubs in the Saudi Super Cup, Al-Ittihad fans chanted Messi’s name as Ronaldo left the pitch following a 3-1 semifinal defeat for Al-Nassr, in a match during which Ronaldo struggled to make an impact despite playing the full 90 minutes. Al-Ittihad supporters have gone as far as publicly calling on their own club to pursue signing Messi ahead of previous high-profile matchups against Ronaldo’s Al-Nassr, further fueling the rivalry’s Messi-versus-Ronaldo undertone even within a domestic Saudi league context.
The taunts have not been limited to matches against Al-Ittihad specifically. In a separate previous match against Saudi rival Al-Hilal, Ronaldo was similarly taunted by opposing fans waving Messi jerseys as he left the field following a defeat in which he was denied a penalty by video assistant referee review and had a separate goal disallowed for offside.
Ronaldo’s history with Al-Ittihad specifically has included other notably tense moments. In an earlier Saudi Pro League meeting between the two clubs, Ronaldo stormed off the pitch down the tunnel, kicking water bottles out of his path, after a 1-0 defeat marked his second consecutive match without scoring at the time. During that same match, Ronaldo removed his captain’s armband before leaving the field and appeared poised to throw it in frustration before regaining his composure, as Al-Ittihad fans chanted Messi’s name throughout that contest as well.
Saturday’s result leaves Al-Ittihad positioned as one of the leading challengers in this season’s Saudi Pro League title race, having handed Al-Nassr its first loss of the campaign under new manager Postecoglou, the former Tottenham Hotspur and Celtic manager who took charge of the club ahead of the current season. Al-Nassr’s perfect start under Postecoglou through the season’s opening four matches had positioned the club as an early front-runner in the domestic title race before Saturday’s setback against one of its most direct rivals.
Ronaldo, now 41 years old, has continued playing a prominent role for Al-Nassr since his high-profile move to the Saudi Pro League, a transfer that helped accelerate the broader influx of major international stars into Saudi Arabian football in the years since. Despite his advancing age, Ronaldo has remained a productive scorer domestically throughout his time in Saudi Arabia, even as matches against Al-Ittihad in particular have proven to be a recurring source of frustration, both in terms of results and the pointed reception he has repeatedly received from that club’s supporters.
The rivalry between Al-Nassr and Al-Ittihad has emerged as one of the marquee fixtures within the Saudi Pro League in recent seasons, with both clubs investing heavily in international talent as part of the league’s broader push to elevate its global profile and competitiveness. Saturday’s match, sometimes referred to by fans and media as a Saudi “El Clasico” given the stature of both clubs, drew significant attention both for the on-field result and the pointed atmosphere surrounding Ronaldo’s performance.
With the Saudi Pro League season still in its early stages, Saturday’s defeat represents an early setback rather than a decisive blow to Al-Nassr’s title ambitions under Postecoglou. Still, the recurring pattern of Messi-themed taunts directed at Ronaldo during matches against Al-Ittihad specifically underscores how deeply the global rivalry between the two players continues to shape the atmosphere surrounding Saudi Arabian football, even years after both men effectively decamped from Europe’s traditional footballing powerhouses to continue their respective careers in different corners of the world.
Business
Preferreds/Bond Weekly Review: PennyMac Mortgage Preferreds Stay Fixed
Preferreds/Bond Weekly Review: PennyMac Mortgage Preferreds Stay Fixed
Business
YouTube Down? Users Report Access Issues Sunday Morning As Reports Spike On Downdetector Worldwide Today
YouTube users began reporting access problems early Sunday morning, with outage-tracking services logging a surge in complaints, marking the latest in a series of intermittent disruptions to affect the video platform over the past several days.
According to outage-tracking reports, the volume of user complaints on Downdetector’s UK tracker surged starting around 5:07 a.m. BST, which corresponds to 12:07 a.m. Eastern time, with users reporting trouble accessing the platform across both the website and mobile app.
Independent monitoring service StatusGator recorded 253 user-submitted outage reports over the preceding 24-hour period as of early Sunday, while overall characterizing YouTube as currently operational. Top reported outage locations over that window included Texas, California and Illinois in the United States, according to the service’s tracking data.
Sunday’s reports add to a pattern of recurring, shorter disruptions that have affected YouTube throughout the past week. StatusGator’s incident log shows a separate outage lasting 2 hours and 9 minutes detected on Sept. 3 at 9:23 p.m., in which users reported YouTube failing to load or connect, along with an earlier incident detected Sept. 2 at 12:21 a.m. that lasted 6 hours and 32 minutes, involving similar connectivity and loading problems. Neither of those prior incidents was officially acknowledged by YouTube at the time they were logged, according to StatusGator’s records.
The recurring smaller disruptions this week follow a considerably larger, global YouTube outage that struck the platform in February 2026. That earlier incident began around 7:50 p.m. ET on Feb. 17, with a massive spike in reports on Downdetector showing more than 280,000 complaints in the United States alone and more than 30,000 in the United Kingdom. YouTube TV was also affected during that outage, with more than 8,000 additional reports logged for that separate streaming service, making it one of the more significant Google-related outages recorded in recent memory.
During the February incident, YouTube’s official TeamYouTube account on X acknowledged the disruption directly.
“If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this and will follow up here with updates,” the TeamYouTube account posted at the time.
Google later confirmed the specific technical cause behind that February outage in a statement posted to YouTube’s official help page.
“We’re aware some of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now. Our teams are aware, and we’ll provide updates as soon as we have them,” the statement read, before the company later attributed the disruption specifically to an issue with YouTube’s recommendation system, which had prevented videos from appearing across various parts of the platform, including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids.
According to Variety’s coverage of that February incident, users were still able to access videos directly through their existing subscriptions during the disruption, even as the homepage and the suggestion bar within the video player displayed as completely blank across both the mobile app and desktop versions of the site. TeamYouTube later confirmed on X that the homepage had been restored, though the recommendation and suggestion features took additional time to fully return to normal function.
That February 2026 disruption itself echoed an earlier, comparably large YouTube outage recorded in 2018, when the platform went down for an extended period beginning around 6:15 p.m. Pacific time, drawing widespread attention at the time given how rarely YouTube experiences significant downtime relative to its massive daily user base.
YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, remains one of the most heavily trafficked websites in the world, serving billions of users who watch and upload video content across virtually every category imaginable. Given that scale, even relatively brief or localized disruptions tend to generate significant public attention and social media discussion, as users quickly turn to platforms like X to check whether an issue they are experiencing reflects a broader outage or is instead isolated to their own device or internet connection.
Outage-tracking platforms including Downdetector and StatusGator compile crowdsourced reports from affected users, comparing the volume of incoming complaints against typical background activity levels to help determine whether a genuine, widespread service disruption is underway. A sudden, sharp spike in reports across a large number of users and locations, as occurred early Sunday, is generally treated as a reasonably strong signal of an emerging platform-level issue, though the underlying cause and full scope of any given disruption can vary significantly from incident to incident.
As of Sunday morning, it remained unclear whether YouTube had issued any official acknowledgment of the reported access issues, or what, if any, technical cause might be responsible for the latest spike in complaints. Given the pattern of intermittent, unacknowledged outages recorded over the preceding days according to StatusGator’s tracking, it also remained uncertain whether Sunday’s reports represented a continuation of that same underlying issue or a separate, unrelated disruption.
Affected users experiencing trouble accessing YouTube were advised to check both Downdetector’s live outage tracker and YouTube’s official help page and support channels for the most current information, while independent monitoring services continued tracking the platform’s real-time availability across different regions and device types in the absence of a detailed public statement from Google addressing the specific cause of Sunday’s reported disruption.
Business
Elon Musk’s Unusual Asks of Boring Co. Backers | Technology for Sept. 6
This is an edition of the WSJ Technology newsletter, a weekly digest of tech columns, big stories and personal tech advice. If you’re not subscribed, sign up here.
Elon Musk knows that many investors will go above and beyond to participate in his companies. Now the tech billionaire wants more than just their money.
Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Business
AEW Star Andy ‘The Butcher’ Williams Dies At 48 After Collapsing During Match In Pennsylvania
MILLVALE, Pa. — Andy Williams, the professional wrestler known to All Elite Wrestling fans as “The Butcher” and a founding guitarist of the metalcore band Every Time I Die, has died at age 48 after collapsing during a match at an independent wrestling event in Pennsylvania on Saturday night.
The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed Williams’ death to TMZ, which was the first outlet to report the news early Sunday morning. Williams had been competing in a tag team match against TME alongside his longtime partner, The Blade, real name Jesse Guilmette, during Enjoy Wrestling’s Five-Year Anniversary show at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale.
According to an eyewitness account provided to POST Wrestling, Williams appeared to be struggling physically toward the end of the match.
“It was towards the end of the match,” eyewitness Rich Fann said. “He seemed to be in a bit of dire straits, they went to a finish, and he was a little wobbly. Andy then went down, and Blade helped him up a bit and then tried to get folks to help. Once they saw, both the crew, the paramedics, and the crowd worked in unison.”
According to wrestling news outlet Fightful, Williams’ legs buckled before he fell to the floor. The Blade attempted to help him back up, but Williams collapsed a second time and lost consciousness. Ringside paramedics performed chest compressions and used a defibrillator on Williams before he was loaded into an ambulance and transported to Allegheny General Hospital.
Enjoy Wrestling immediately canceled the remainder of the event following the incident and released a statement on social media confirming what had happened.
“Andy collapsed at the end of his match this evening,” the promotion wrote. “Our doctors on staff tended to him immediately, administering CPR until the ambulance arrived. We sent everyone home and are at the hospital now waiting for more information.”
The promotion later posted a brief follow-up message thanking those who had assisted at the scene and reached out with support in the hours following the incident.
News of Williams’ death was initially met with confusion online. A wrestling podcaster had reported hours earlier that Williams had died at the hospital, prompting Enjoy Wrestling to respond directly to a social media post repeating that claim, writing, “It’s not true. Delete this.” That response was subsequently deleted by the promotion without further explanation, adding to the uncertainty surrounding Williams’ condition until the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed his death to TMZ on Sunday morning, resolving the conflicting reports. No cause of death has been released, with an official investigation and autopsy pending.
Williams, a Buffalo, New York native, built a distinctive dual career spanning both professional wrestling and heavy music. He was a founding guitarist of Every Time I Die, an influential metalcore band formed in 1998 that became a significant act within the genre before disbanding in 2022 after more than two decades together. Williams continued making music following the band’s breakup, most recently performing with his newer metalcore project, Atomic Rule.
Williams’ wrestling career gained momentum after he trained under mixed martial artist and wrestler Josh Barnett. He formed the tag team known as The Butcher and The Blade alongside Guilmette, and the pair eventually brought their act to All Elite Wrestling in 2019, becoming one of the promotion’s recognizable tag team acts over the years that followed. Williams spent the better part of the last seven years competing as one half of that duo within AEW.
Tributes to Williams poured in from across both the wrestling and music communities following confirmation of his death. Musician Andy H. Murray offered a heartfelt remembrance on social media.
“Andy Williams, rest in peace,” Murray wrote. “With ETID (and later Atomic Rule), he blazed musical trails, redefined heavy music, and influenced a generation. As The Butcher, he was an awesome throwback brawler. He was a great man with a beautiful soul. I am so sorry for those closest to him.”
Wrestling fan and commentator Mark, who posts under the handle WrestleMobs, similarly reflected on Williams’ impact across both of his creative pursuits.
“I adored The Butcher throughout AEW’s formative years,” the tribute read. “Huge condolences and prayers to his family, friends, colleagues and fans worldwide mourning the loss of an incredible multi talented musician, wrestler, performer and man. Rest in Peace, Andy Williams.”
Notably, Williams and The Blade had held a wrestling seminar through Enjoy Wrestling the night before the fatal incident, as part of the promotion’s broader Five-Year Anniversary weekend of events. Williams and Guilmette had been challenging TME for the tag team championship at the time of the medical emergency, a title match that ultimately went unfinished following the cancellation of the remainder of the card.
As of Sunday, no statement had been made public from Williams’ immediate family, and additional details regarding funeral or memorial arrangements had not yet been announced. Wrestling promotions and outlets covering the sport, including publications that had closely followed Williams’ AEW career, extended condolences to his family, friends and colleagues in the wake of the confirmed death.
Williams’ unique path, building parallel careers as both a touring heavy metal musician and a professional wrestler over more than two decades, had earned him a devoted following across both communities, with fans and fellow performers alike remembering him Sunday as a distinctive and beloved figure within both worlds. Investigators with the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office are expected to conduct a full autopsy to determine the specific cause of Williams’ death, with additional information likely to follow in the coming days as the investigation continues.
Business
Brand New Day’ Crosses $900 Million, Nears All-Time Domestic Box Office Record This Labor Day
LOS ANGELES — “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” crossed $900 million at the domestic box office Friday, becoming only the second film in cinema history to reach that milestone and positioning the Sony and Marvel blockbuster to overtake “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” as the highest-grossing domestic release of all time in the coming days.
The Tom Holland-led film reached the $900 million threshold in just 36 days, according to Deadline, shattering the previous record for fastest film to hit that mark, which had been set by “The Force Awakens” in 50 days following its 2015 release. The only prior film to ever cross $900 million domestically, “The Force Awakens” finished its theatrical run with $936.6 million, a figure that has stood as the unadjusted all-time North American box office record for more than a decade.
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, “Brand New Day” was on track to spend its sixth consecutive weekend atop the domestic box office over the four-day Labor Day holiday period, with projections estimating the film would earn roughly $22 million over the extended weekend. According to Deadline’s estimates, that would push the film’s cumulative domestic total to approximately $921 million by the close of business Monday, leaving it just $15 million to $16 million short of overtaking “The Force Awakens’” all-time record.
The film’s remarkable staying power has come during what is typically a quieter stretch of the summer movie calendar. New wide releases including “By Any Means” and A24’s “Onslaught” were not expected to seriously challenge “Brand New Day’s” hold on the top spot at the box office, according to industry tracking.
Tom Holland could occupy both of the top two positions at the domestic box office this Labor Day weekend. Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” which also stars Holland, was projected to finish in second place with approximately $16.4 million over the extended weekend, according to reporting on the weekend’s box office estimates. The Universal epic, now in its eighth weekend in theaters, was expected to reach roughly $588.1 million domestically by Monday.
“Brand New Day’s” success has extended well beyond North America. The film has earned more than $2.33 billion worldwide, placing it third on the all-time global box office chart, trailing only James Cameron’s “Avatar” and Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame.” The film recently surpassed “Avatar: The Way of Water’s” lifetime global total of roughly $2.32 billion to claim that third-place position outright.
According to Deadline, industry analysts have pointed to significant repeat viewership as a central driver behind the film’s extraordinary staying power at the box office, noting that audiences have been returning to theaters to see the film multiple times, a pattern that helps explain why the movie has maintained such unusually strong week-over-week grosses relative to typical blockbuster releases.
The film’s opening weekend alone set its own significant record, earning $360.1 million from 4,487 North American theaters, a figure that broke the previous domestic opening-weekend record of $357.1 million held by “Avengers: Endgame” since 2019. “Brand New Day” also became the second-fastest film in history to reach $1 billion at the global box office, accomplishing that feat in just six days following its release.
Forbes contributor Tim Lammers had flagged the approaching $900 million milestone as imminent as of Aug. 31, at which point the film had reached $891.8 million in domestic earnings through its 31st day of release, following its fourth consecutive weekend atop the domestic chart at that time. Box Office Watch’s tracking data placed the film at $891.5 million after 31 days, positioning it as on pace to become the fastest film in history to reach the $900 million domestic threshold, a projection that ultimately proved accurate when the film crossed the mark on Friday.
Industry watchers have noted that “Brand New Day” is unlikely to become the first film in history to reach $1 billion at the domestic box office alone, a milestone no film has yet achieved. However, the film remains firmly on pace to catch and surpass “The Force Awakens’” all-time domestic record within the coming days or weeks, according to multiple box office trackers.
The film’s continued dominance is expected to hold at least through the following two weeks, with “Brand New Day” not projected to lose its grip on the top box office spot until the horror franchise installment “Resident Evil” opens later this month, according to reporting from Central Jersey citing industry projections.
Beyond its box office performance, “Brand New Day’s” extended theatrical run has also contributed significantly to the broader summer 2026 box office season. According to Deadline, the film’s continued strength through Labor Day weekend has helped push the overall summer domestic box office toward a potential all-time record total of $4.76 billion, reflecting the outsized role the Spider-Man sequel has played in propping up theatrical attendance throughout what industry analysts had otherwise expected to be a comparatively subdued summer season for new releases.
“Brand New Day” stars Holland alongside Zendaya and Sadie Sink, continuing the Spider-Man film franchise’s recent run under Sony and Marvel Studios’ joint production arrangement. The film’s box office trajectory throughout the summer has consistently outpaced the historical release-window pace set by “The Force Awakens” a decade earlier, a comparison box office analysts have closely tracked given the two films’ shared status as the only movies in cinema history to reach the $900 million domestic threshold.
With Labor Day weekend’s final box office totals still being finalized, the precise timing of when “Brand New Day” will officially surpass “The Force Awakens” to claim the all-time domestic box office record remains uncertain, though multiple industry trackers now describe the outcome as effectively inevitable barring a dramatic and unexpected collapse in the film’s remaining theatrical run. For Sony and Marvel Studios, the milestone would mark a significant validation of the studios’ continued investment in the Spider-Man franchise, which has now produced what is on track to become the highest-grossing film ever released at the North American box office, unadjusted for inflation, more than a decade after “The Force Awakens” first set that benchmark in December 2015.
Business
X-Energy Could Be Building One Of Nuclear Energy's Most Valuable Platforms
X-Energy Could Be Building One Of Nuclear Energy's Most Valuable Platforms
Business
Nvidia: 70% Growth Guidance Makes This A Strong Buy (NASDAQ:NVDA)
Dhierin-Perkash Bechai is an aerospace, defense and airline analyst.
Dhierin runs the investing group The Aerospace Forum, whose goal is to discover investment opportunities in the aerospace, defense and airline industry. With a background in aerospace engineering, he provides analysis of a complex industry with significant growth prospects, and offers context to developments as they occur, describing how they might affect investment theses. His investing ideas are driven by data informed analysis. The investing group also provides direct access to data analytics monitors.
Learn more.
Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have no stock, option or similar derivative position in any of the companies mentioned, and no plans to initiate any such positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Seeking Alpha’s Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.
Business
AI-Generated Food Images Spoil Appetites As Restaurants Turn To ChatGPT For Menu Photos
Consumers across the country are increasingly encountering artificial intelligence-generated images of food on restaurant menus and marketing materials, and many say the results are unappetizing, misleading and sparking a wave of online backlash against the growing trend.
The controversy gained fresh attention after Jill Sennett, a 37-year-old nurse in Denver, shared AI-generated menu images from a Jamaican barbecue pop-up restaurant with her 26,000 followers on X, showing meats that appeared to resemble leather belts covered in tiny beetles. The post was reshared by more than 500 people, many of whom expressed similar disgust at the images.
Sennett said the trend feels like a troubling shift in how restaurants present food to customers.
“Such an essential human experience,” Sennett said of eating, adding that she views the shift toward AI-generated food imagery as “a bad cultural thing that restaurants are converting to these horrific, uncanny food images that are unappetizing.”
Despite her reaction to the images, Sennett said she still ordered chicken and macaroni and cheese from the restaurant, noting it was one of her only lunch options at the time and that she had eaten there previously.
The manager of Jamaican Jerk and Barbecue Restaurant, the Denver establishment that hosted the pop-up at Sennett’s hospital, confirmed he had used ChatGPT to generate the menu images rather than paying a graphic designer, a service he does use for the restaurant’s permanent, bricks-and-mortar location.
“We decided we would design something that was eye-catching,” the manager said, declining to give his name for publication. “Restaurant people are trying to be cost-effective.”
According to a 2026 report from the National Restaurant Association, 26% of restaurant operators now use AI in some capacity to assist with marketing, inventory management, employee scheduling, menu optimization or order taking, reflecting the technology’s growing footprint across the industry even as consumer reactions to specific applications, particularly AI-generated food imagery, have proven mixed at best.
Backlash to the trend has been particularly sharp in the San Francisco Bay Area, a hub for AI development. When San Francisco cafe Grind & Unwind put up signage depicting menu items that locals quickly identified as AI-generated, vandals graffitied the storefront with a message cafe owner Lyndsey Lozano interpreted as reading “seriously.” A Reddit post titled “Yum, slop” drew commenters comparing the AI-generated bread images to textures resembling reptile skin and a loofah.
Lozano told SFGate in July that the reaction was “not what we were expecting,” noting the signage had only been intended as a temporary measure. She and her husband subsequently removed the AI-generated signage and spent an estimated $700 painting over the resulting graffiti, according to SFGate.
Sennett said she finds some amusement in AI’s continued struggles to convincingly render food.
“It can do uncanny videos of celebrities, but it can’t depict a hamburger,” Sennett said. “I hope it stays that way, honestly, and we can shame restaurants into stopping.”
Industry professionals say the technology’s growing use reflects genuine cost pressures facing restaurants, even as its application to customer-facing imagery specifically remains contentious. Hunter Lewis, editor in chief of Food and Wine magazine, said he has observed restaurants increasingly automating parts of their back-end operations, but cautioned that AI’s use should generally remain invisible to diners.
“The American dining public is smart,” Lewis said. “They know what they want, and they know what is real.”
Some restaurants have leaned into rejecting the technology entirely as a marketing strategy of its own. When Wyoming restaurant Chugwater Soda Fountain publicly pledged, on a piece of cardboard, that it would never use AI and would instead continue posting hand-drawn images of its burgers, the Instagram post drew more than 200,000 likes, with some commenters celebrating the homespun approach while others noted the irony of posting the pledge on an AI-powered social media platform.
Jamie Soja, a professional photographer in the Bay Area who has shot images for restaurant marketing and food-delivery services, said AI-generated images most often fail to accurately capture a dish’s texture.
“The color and texture and the ingredients look kind of off in the way that they’re arranged,” Soja said, adding that lighting in AI-generated food images frequently appears unnatural as well.
Major technology platforms are increasingly embedding AI tools directly into their systems, further complicating the debate. Food-delivery app DoorDash offers AI photo tools designed “to improve the presentation of an existing image of a dish,” adjusting lighting, color or background, the company said in a statement. DoorDash said its policies prohibit restaurants from creating or altering misleading images of menu items, and that the company reviews menu images for compliance, automatically applying an “AI-enhanced” label to images edited using its tool. Even so, distinguishing AI-generated images from simply heavily edited photography can prove difficult even for trained professionals like Soja.
Researchers have begun studying how AI-generated food imagery affects consumer perception and appetite. In a 2024 study, Charles Spence, a University of Oxford professor of experimental psychology, found that consumers generally preferred AI-generated food images when they did not know the images had been created by a machine, but rated the same images as less appealing once that fact was disclosed to them. Spence’s research also found that AI tools tend to alter food images in predictable ways, often adding visual cues of fat, such as butter on mashed potatoes, when prompted to make an image appear more appealing, raising concerns that such imagery could subtly nudge both diners and chefs toward larger portions with higher fat content over time.
The backlash has extended even to professionals who work with AI regularly. Brandon Hill, chief executive of a design and marketing agency in San Francisco, said he was sufficiently put off by AI-generated menu images at a downtown cafe that he photographed and shared them with his more than 86,000 followers on X, noting that even in a city known for AI development, the resulting images “don’t look all that appetizing.” Hill said the images also left him “skeptical of what the actual meals will look like.”
Not every restaurant owner has faced the same backlash. Nila Norero Salvatore, owner of Bella Cafe, the San Francisco cafe referenced in Hill’s post, said she has not personally received complaints about the ChatGPT-designed signage advertising her breakfast menu. Norero Salvatore, 65, described herself and her husband as “old-fashioned,” adding that experimenting with AI has felt “fun” and “new for us.” She said she also uses ChatGPT to help write employee reference letters and draft the cafe’s staff handbook.
Beyond the cost savings on graphic design, Norero Salvatore said she genuinely likes how the AI-generated images look.
“I think it’s a great way of advertising our products, even though sometimes people say AI isn’t effective or it’s not natural,” she said.
As restaurants continue navigating the still-developing norms around AI-generated imagery in customer-facing marketing, the sharply divided reactions from diners, industry professionals and restaurant owners alike suggest the debate over the technology’s place on menus is likely to persist even as more establishments experiment with the cost-saving tools.
Business
SmartCentres: A 6.75% Dividend Yield With Walmart As Anchor Tenant (OTCMKTS:CWYUF)
The Investment Doctor is a financial writer, highlighting European small-caps with a 5-7 year investment horizon. He strongly believes a portfolio should consist of a mixture of dividend and growth stocks.
He is the leader of the investment group European Small Cap Ideas which offers exclusive access to actionable research on appealing Europe-focused investment opportunities not found elsewhere. The a focus is on high-quality ideas in the small-cap space, with emphasis on capital gains and dividend income for continuous cash flow. Features include: two model portfolios – the European Small Cap Ideas portfolio and the European REIT Portfolio, weekly updates, educational content to learn more about the European investing opportunities, and an active chat room to discuss the latest developments of the portfolio holdings. Learn more.
Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have no stock, option or similar derivative position in any of the companies mentioned, and no plans to initiate any such positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Seeking Alpha’s Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.
Business
Google Down? Users Report Login And Content Loading Issues Across Search, YouTube And Play In The US
Google users across the United States began reporting widespread access problems Sunday, with complaints spanning multiple services including Google Search, YouTube, Google Play and account login pages, according to outage-tracking reports.
According to monitoring data compiled Sunday, 42% of reported problems involved content failing to load, 29% involved difficulties logging into accounts, and 18% involved general website access issues, indicating that the disruption is affecting users across a range of different Google products rather than being confined to a single feature or service.
Independent status-tracking service StatusGator characterized Google Workspace, the company’s suite of productivity tools including Gmail, Google Docs and Google Drive, as operational as of its most recent check Sunday morning, while still logging more than 100 user-submitted outage reports across various Workspace-related services over the preceding 24-hour period. Separate checks of Google Chrome and Google Docs specifically similarly showed the services as officially operational despite continued user complaints trickling in throughout the day.
Google, owned by parent company Alphabet, provides a wide range of interconnected services used by billions of people worldwide, including its core search engine, Gmail email service, YouTube video hosting platform, Google Maps navigation, the Chrome web browser, the Android mobile operating system, the Google Play digital distribution platform, Google Drive cloud storage, and Google Ads, the company’s advertising platform for businesses. Given that scale and the degree of interconnection between these services, many of which rely on shared underlying authentication and infrastructure systems, disruptions affecting one part of Google’s ecosystem can frequently ripple outward to affect several other products simultaneously.
Sunday’s reported issues add to a documented history of periodic Google outages, some brief and isolated to specific services, others considerably more widespread. In June 2025, a significant Google Cloud Platform outage disrupted services across the internet, affecting not only Google’s own products such as Google Meet, but also a range of other major platforms, including Cloudflare, OpenAI, Twitch, Discord, Nintendo and Spotify, all of which rely on Google’s cloud infrastructure to varying degrees. That incident, which Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian later addressed directly, was fully resolved within roughly a day, with Google apologizing for what it described in a subsequent blog post as “a failure on our part,” even while noting that the immediate trigger for the outage stemmed from a third-party vendor issue.
Other historical Google outages have centered more specifically on the company’s authentication systems, which govern user sign-ins across its various products. In one earlier widespread incident, an authentication-related bug caused disruptions across Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Play and Chrome Sync simultaneously, with some users reporting that their Chrome browsers would crash entirely when attempting to load Gmail, a symptom that pointed directly to the underlying authentication issue as the root cause.
Google Calendar specifically has also experienced its own periodic standalone outages over the years, including one notable incident that began around 8:15 a.m. Pacific time and left the service largely inaccessible for a significant number of users before being fully restored later that morning, a disruption the company acknowledged shortly after it began.
Given Google’s central role in global internet infrastructure, outages affecting the company’s services tend to generate immediate and widespread public attention, with affected users frequently turning to social media platforms to check whether problems they are experiencing reflect a broader outage or are instead isolated to their own device, browser or internet connection. Outage-tracking platforms such as Downdetector and StatusGator compile crowdsourced reports from users experiencing difficulties, comparing the volume of incoming complaints against typical background activity levels to help determine whether a genuine, widespread service disruption is underway.
As of Sunday, Google had not issued a detailed public statement specifically addressing the reported access issues affecting Search, YouTube, Google Play and account login pages, consistent with the company’s general practice of acknowledging major outages formally only once report volumes climb well beyond routine background levels, and often providing only limited technical detail about the underlying cause even after an incident has been resolved.
For users experiencing difficulty accessing Google services, standard troubleshooting steps typically recommended by technology support resources include verifying an active and stable internet connection, restarting the affected application or clearing the browser’s cache and cookies, checking for and installing any pending software or app updates, and confirming whether the issue is isolated to a single Google product or affecting multiple services simultaneously, which can help determine whether the underlying cause is more likely tied to a broader account authentication problem rather than an issue specific to an individual app.
Given the scale of Google’s global user base, even relatively contained or short-lived disruptions can generate outsized attention and disruption for businesses and individuals who rely heavily on the company’s services for everyday tasks, including email communication, document collaboration, video hosting, mobile app distribution and general web search. That reliance has made Google outages, historically infrequent relative to the scale of the company’s operations, a recurring source of significant public interest whenever they do occur, given how many other digital services and daily routines depend on Google’s infrastructure functioning normally.
As of Sunday, it remained unclear how long the reported access issues would persist or what specific technical cause might be responsible for the disruption affecting login, content loading and general website access across multiple Google products. Affected users were advised to continue monitoring both independent outage-tracking services and Google’s own official status and support channels for updates, as the company worked, without formal public acknowledgment as of the time of this report, to address the underlying issues contributing to Sunday’s reported disruptions.
-
Fashion2 days agoWeekend Open Thread: Beyond Yoga
-
Crypto World2 days agoBitcoin price stalls near $82K as key resistance holds
-
Politics2 days agoBest Gaming Laptops, CPUs, TVs, And Keyboards To Upgrade Your Set Up For GTA VI
-
Tech2 days agoThe Birds Outside, Drawn For You Automatically
-
Crypto World2 days agoIMF Says El Salvador’s Post-Review Bitcoin Purchases Used No Public Funds
-
Crypto World2 days agoU.S. added stronger than expected 162,000 jobs in August as labor market bounced back
-
Sports2 days agoAlexandre Pato consortium’s Northampton Town investment approved
-
Sports2 days agoCommanders’ Chig Okonkwo is a top breakout fantasy football candidate
-
Sports2 days agoGolden Eaglets Drawn in Group B for 2026 WAFU B U17 Championship
-
Crypto World2 days agoXRP price breaks falling channel as bulls target $1.53
-
Politics2 days agoA new European chapter for Gibraltar
-
Politics2 days agoHow To Avoid Winter Colds: 4 Everyday Habits That Spread Germs, Says Pharmacist
-
Politics2 days agoThe House | Bin the lectures, bring gossip and be ready to banter: how the new PM should prepare for his Trump encounter
-
Crypto World2 days agoFrom warning to listing: UK’s largest retail investment platform opens access to crypto ETNs
-
Crypto World2 days agoFinCEN flags $12.7B tied to Southeast Asia crypto investment scams
-
Tech2 days agoA Worthy Android Ereader, With Some Tradeoffs
-
Tech2 days agoHow To Edit Claude’s Memory
-
Crypto World2 days agoTrezor Data Breach Impacts 67,000 More US Customers
-
Politics2 days ago33 Cosy Autumn Home Decor Ideas: Blankets, Pumpkin Decorations, And Candles
-
Tech2 days agobeyerdynamic AVENTHO Y Debuts at IFA 2026 and Makes Wireless Headphones Less Disposable

You must be logged in to post a comment Login