Why I Won't Eat At Restaurants That Use AI Images

Images generated by "artificial intelligence" are becoming impossible to avoid. Even the Super Bowl featured a creepy ad full of soulless dancing "people" for Svedka vodka that was AI-generated. If you scroll through delivery apps, you find examples of eerily perfect and bright images representing a restaurant's dish. Whenever I see any food brand using an AI image, I avoid it. It's a signal to me that the actual food served there is not good.

I regularly walk my dog past a pizzeria on my street that uses an AI image of an impossibly cheesy slice on a sandwich board on the sidewalk. The cheese drips off the side in a way that's meant to look delicious, but is not how melted cheese works. The computer is trying to make an actual depiction of something that never was real. Our human minds place it in the "uncanny valley" between existence and imitation where it occupies neither space. Before the board popped up on the street, I tried a pie there and found it disappointing. The shop used low-quality cheese and it had a tasteless crust. I've found places like this resort to AI images because the actual product made there is not good.

Delicious, cheesy pizza shouldn't need to be faked. It's already photogenic. If a pizzeria can't get a photo of delicious pizza, my first thought is it's because they don't serve delicious pizza. Yes, food photographers can cost a lot, but many restaurants do just fine with the high-quality camera on modern phones. Influencers flood Instagram with great photos of what they're eating, proving you don't need to go all out to pay for a photographer. All you need to do is follow our tips on taking better pictures and you can spare yourself trying to find the right prompt to convince an AI bot that a cheese pull comes from the sides of a slice and not the middle.

Some may say food photography lies. They may point to debunked myths, such as using motor oil on pancakes in place of maple syrup. Yes, food stylists make food look better, making that McDonald's burger look plumper and juicier than what you end up unwrapping in your car. But the image is still real food. I'll give it a shot once and learn in the future that what they have on display is not what they serve, as opposed to what they have on display is not possible in our reality.