We Found The Most Hunger-Killing AI Food Pics Restaurants Are Flaunting

Restaurants are serving up AI-generated food photos, and critics say they’re hard to stomach.

Eateries across the country are swapping real photographs of their dishes for images made with artificial intelligence. While AI image tools save small businesses time and money, some observers have mocked their results online for showing food that looks warped, unsettling and grotesque.

Daisy’s Diner and Bar in Brooklyn photographs its real dishes and then touches up the images with AI “to get the message out there,” the owner, Jordan Beau, said in a Sept. 24 Wall Street Journal video showcasing restaurants’ application of AI photography.

“All of our food is shot live by real people and we’re using AI to enhance it. That’s it,” Beau said. “And it allows our design team to be able to take an image that used to take them two or three hours to enhance now takes them two or three minutes.”

People say the AI-enhanced imagery results in “great menus,” according to Beau.

‘Yum, Slop’

But not every restaurant’s experiment with AI has gone over well.

San Francisco cafe Grind & Unwind was criticized online after owners AJ and Lyndsey Lozano hung a temporary menu featuring AI food images while the couple got the business off the ground in May, SFGATE reported.

“Yum, slop,” a Reddit user wrote on June 30 in a post sharing a photo of Grind & Unwind’s AI-generated menu. “I reckon utilizing AI imagery for the storefront menu board doesn’t correlate with a long tenured small business in this neighborhood.”

“That coleslaw looks terrible, and all the bread looks like reptile skin,” another Reddit user said, describing the menu.