\n \u201cNot too long ago, people would just take a picture of the food and that would be on the menu. Now, these AI-generated pictures \u2014 the saturation, the coloring, the texture. It\u2019s like you don\u2019t even know what you\u2019re going to get when it comes out,\u201d Onejeme said in an interview. \u201cAt that point, is it false advertising?\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Generative AI has quickly become prevalent<\/a> in marketing, particularly in illustrations or videos<\/a>, to the discomfort or disdain of many beholders. In the dining scene, whether at food trucks or bodegas, diners or cafes, the use of \u201cAI slop menus,\u201d<\/a> as some TikTokers<\/a> have dubbed<\/a> them, can signify qualities people generally don\u2019t want to associate with food: low quality, laziness or, well, slop.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cFood is important to us,\u201d said Alexander Diel, a psychologist at Germany\u2019s University of Duisburg-Essen, who is among a team of scientists investigating the public\u2019s responses to AI-generated photos of food. \u201cAt the same time, it\u2019s something that can easily make us sick, so we are very sensitive to when something is even slightly off.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n AI-generated food advertisements have drawn particularly intense reactions. BuzzFeed described<\/a> them as the \u201crestaurant red flag that will keep people away,\u201d while Mashable declared<\/a> them \u201cnightmare fuel.\u201d In Food & Wine magazine, features editor Kat Kinsman complained<\/a> the pictures were ruining her appetite. \u201cI would rather see a photo of a sheet of notebook paper messily scrawled with the day\u2019s specials in the chef\u2019s own hand than feel the queasy upset as my eyes and brain try to meet across the uncanny valley of a dish I know cannot be real,\u201d Kinsman wrote, expressing a sentiment shared by many others<\/a> online.\n <\/p>\n \n The phenomenon is not just limited to the US. In Tokyo, sandwiches are advertised with an image in which the bagel seems to be made of cobwebs<\/a> and contains a tuna salad that appears to have been inserted via a piping bag. In Kuala Lumpur, a bowl of spaghetti marinara<\/a> looks like perfectly arranged yarn or strings of Play-Doh. And in Berlin, various lunch options seem to include a plastic-looking quiche with holes<\/a> or a penne pasta made from rubber.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI see a lot of AI food and it just looks a bit shiny and strange, but there\u2019s something particularly alien and wrong with this one,\u201d said 30-year-old tour guide Julia Damphouse, who took the viral photo of the Berlin restaurant billboard last month after first noticing it earlier in summer. \u201cThere is something wrong with it. It looks too geometric. I imagine that\u2019s it\u2019s like if you take acid and food stops looking like food.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n AI pictures of food seem to be up against the same problem as images of people or animals: the so-called uncanny valley. First introduced as a concept by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori<\/a> in 1970, the uncanny valley is the term given to eerie or repellant feelings that can be triggered within people when they are confronted with slight imperfections in humanlike figures.\n <\/p>\n \n Admittedly, though, some of the most viral images of AI food menus don\u2019t just contain slight imperfections; they\u2019re alienlike catastrophes. \u201cIt stopped us in our tracks,\u201d said Sam Biddle, a technology reporter at the Intercept who took a widely shared photo<\/a> of a supposed shrimp scampi dish at a deli he visited in August, featuring circular creatures that Biddle later compared to monsters from the works of sci-fi writer HP Lovecraft. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just unappetizing \u2014 which, you know, it is \u2014 but it was also sort of spiritually unsettling and cosmically unnerving.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Running a restaurant in 2026 is no easy task. Facing rising costs and uneven customer traffic, 42% of operators said their eateries failed to turn a profit in 2025, according to the National Restaurant Association<\/a>. As they look to save money wherever possible, 26% of restaurant owners are using AI, the NRA said in its latest annual report<\/a> published in February, with the majority of those using the tools to assist with marketing.\n <\/p>\n \n Initially, as AI began rapidly advancing a few years back, there were signs customers were not yet sensitized to the images and their flaws. In 2023, the British restaurant ordering and payment platform Slerp surveyed 100 people and found more than 60% couldn\u2019t tell if different images of food were authentic photographs or AI-generated.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cFor those brands and companies constrained by resources, timings or budgets, we would say as long as the images still look good enough to eat and reflect the real item being offered, then why not try it,\u201d Slerp founder JP Then advised<\/a> at the time. (That page has since been removed from Slerp\u2019s website.)\n <\/p>\n \n But as AI images become widespread, there are signs that may be changing \u2014 especially when it comes to pictures of what consumers physically consume.\n <\/p>\n \n In one 2025 peer-reviewed study<\/a>, Diel and his fellow researchers found that viewers rated slightly imperfect AI food images as significantly more \u201cuncanny\u201d and less pleasant than either nonrealistic food images or highly realistic looking food. In another study<\/a> published last month, Diel\u2019s team found that although people judged realistic and nonrealistic images of the same food to have the same health or caloric qualities, they expressed less desire to actually eat the AI food \u2014 a finding in line with prior studies<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n Diel and his fellow psychologists have a couple of hypotheses as to why people seem averse to AI food. It could be that these slightly-off images trigger our evolutionary sensitivities to food that may be unsafe to eat, much in the way our sense of disgust has developed to protect us from harmful things<\/a>. Alternatively, it could just be that these images play into the fear of trying unfamiliar foods \u2014 something called food neophobia \u2014 for similar evolutionary reasons. \u201cWe don\u2019t know if the food is safe or not, so we\u2019d rather be careful and not eat it,\u201d Diel explained.\n <\/p>\n \n When these pictures go viral, they can negatively affect operators who may have had the best of intentions. At least one small restaurant was forced to respond to negative Google reviews it had received when a picture of its AI-illustrated menu took off online this summer.\n <\/p>\n![\"Among](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/hqbaj9ga0aartjd.jpg\")
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