A.I. food art has rapidly become an extreme red flag for me. If a restaurant uses it on their signage, I’m likely to steer clear of them entirely. Just take a photo of the thing you make!1
My pal Andy Ihnatko sagely noted Anthony Bourdain’s rule against eating at a restaurant with a filthy bathroom, and proposed the presence of A.I. food art as a similarly useful filter. I agree. Whatever the reality may be, the use of A.I. generated food imagery smacks of a lack of dedication to their craft.
Recently, though, some innocent restaurants got the short end of it. In the UK, food delivery platform Just Eat started generating A.I. slop images for their dishes. As you can see, this led to some very dumb results.
Even if we ignore the very incorrect tigers, I don’t think that dish would be a soup.
Footnotes:
I do acknowledge that photographing food in an appetizing way takes a bit of work. Still, A.I. fakery is far worse than either a mediocre photo or no photo. ↩︎
