Ugly AI Food Photos Are Only the Beginning

I can’t stop staring at the AI-slop images of Mexican food I see during my morning walk to work. On the menu posted outside, the taco truck displays lunch options that appear uncanny and unappetizing, as if an alien who’s never eaten human food before drew a taco from memory. This food truck is not alone in putting AI-generated images on its menu. It’s everywhere.

AI menu slop is now going viral for being disgusting, and these posters seem to be an evolution of the “ChatGPT flyer pandemic.” Whether it’s a maggot-infested burrito or a plasticky pasta, consumers are expressing online how gross these fabricated images look. The aesthetic is distinctively off-putting, sometimes with random holes throughout a dish or otherworldly cuts of meat served as an entree.

The images are immediately noticeable but only scratch the surface of how generative AI tools have already overhauled restaurant menus. Sellers aren’t just generating AI images of burgers, they’re also relying on AI to decide what goes in between those two buns.

Digital Demands

The birth of the online menu set us on the path toward these monstrosities. More consumers started deciding what to eat based on online menus and by ordering delivery from their phones to their doorstep. Faced with growing pressure, restaurant owners digitized their menus and created additional visuals.

Stores wanted to capitalize on delivery sales and leaned into generative AI images, vying for a visibility boost on third-party apps like DoorDash without paying for a photoshoot. While the most powerful models currently on the market can output photorealistic images of food, many of these images appear to be generated by tools with worse capabilities, like the default setting of a free chatbot.

“I went to order pizza one night on Uber Eats,” says Brendan Sweeney, CEO and cofounder of Popmenu, a digital marketing software company for restaurants. “There were five different pizza places that were using the same AI-generated image.” He says if the food image appears “completely inauthentic” and “obviously AI,” then the restaurant is making a worse decision than foregoing photography altogether.

What was originally generated to satisfy digital demand is now creeping its way into the physical world. AI menu slop expanded from its online origins into posters in coffee shops and signs displayed as deli menus. Restaurant owners sometimes seem oblivious to how off-putting low-quality image generations look.

TasteGPT

Noticeably AI-generated images stand out on modern menus for all the wrong reasons. But AI tools are influencing what appears on your local coffee shop’s menu, beyond just images.

Tastewise, one of the largest data insights companies in the food and beverage industry, partners with companies like Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Kraft Heinz. It’s currently all-in on “agentic” automations for every step of the food creation process.

Tastewise’s library of automations is meant to help companies decide what foods to sell and how to sell them. There’s an agent to help you track how product launches are going, an agent to test new concepts (banana creatine smoothies, anyone?), and an agent to find opportunity gaps in current menus.

“I think the bigger question for them is how do they guide and train the AI on what should be in that burger and what should be on the menu,” says Michael Bortinger, Tastewise’s director of marketing and partnerships. “We have billions of data points understanding what consumers are doing with food, what’s actually happening on menus and in the retail landscape.”