{"id":757804,"date":"2026-09-02T14:06:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T14:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/757804\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T14:06:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T14:06:22","slug":"the-unique-horrors-of-a-i-food-slop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/757804\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do we hope to communicate when we film and photograph food? In his 1957 collection, \u201cMythologies<\/a>,\u201d Roland Barthes argued that food photography was often an exercise in whitewashing: the highly stylized pictures featured in glossy magazines, which he called \u201cornamental cookery,\u201d precluded a person \u201cfrom touching on the real problems concerning food,\u201d such as the \u201cprimary nature of foodstuffs, the brutality of meat or the abruptness of sea-food.\u201d These photos were \u201cmeant for the eye alone, since sight is a genteel sense,\u201d Barthes wrote. Modern food television, meanwhile, engaged in a different kind of beautification. Bill Buford, writing<\/a> for The New Yorker, in 2006, explained that cooking shows often filmed food \u201cso close that you can see an ingredient\u2019s \u2018pores\u2019\u00a0. . . which then triggers some kind of Neanderthal reflex.\u201d (As Bob Tuschman, then the Food Network\u2019s head of programming, told Buford: \u201cIf you\u2019re flicking from channel to channel and come upon food that has been shot in this way, you will be hardwired as a human being to stop, look, and bring it back to your cave.\u201d) The term \u201cfood porn\u201d grew in popularity around this time, becoming a catchall for visuals of ornate dishes \u201cdivorced from [their] nutritive or taste qualities,\u201d as the critic Richard Magee put it, in a journal article from 2007. Salivating over images of a blue-rare steak or a crystallized-apple crumble permitted one to feel as if culinary appreciation could be refined in the abstract, without needing to perform labor, expend capital, or actually eat anything.<\/p>\n

The next frontier of food imagery has proven far less appealing than whatever food porn was. From Minneapolis to Hexentanzplatz, restaurants are plastering menus and promotional materials with A.I.-generated renditions of shrimp scampi<\/a> and quiche<\/a>, chicken nuggets<\/a> and burritos<\/a>, Italian subs<\/a> and bacon, egg, and cheeses<\/a>. Anyone with even the mildest case of trypophobia\u2014the sense of revulsion from tiny clusters and holes\u2014should avert their eyes. A nauseating, nightmarish quality defines A.I.\u2019s insectified interpretation of human cuisine, as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon. This may explain the categorical outrage over this latest misuse of generative A.I.: such renderings of food\u2014genuinely, slop\u2014offend the materiality of the living in a way that A.I.\u2019s distortions of words and other inanimate objects somehow do not. These images violate science; they mock life itself. It is Barthes\u2019 conception of ornamental cookery infested with maggots; it is the Food Network, aired from hell.<\/p>\n

As A.I. weasels its way into every corner of daily life, it was only a matter of time before it came for our food. Unlike film and music and literature, there have hardly been any anxieties about the machines coming for cooking\u2014though perhaps there should be. Beyond graphic design, restaurants have started integrating A.I. into their business operations to \u201coptimize both topline sales and overall profitability,\u201d according to Jean-Georges Vongerichten<\/a>, a chef who owns and operates fine-dining establishments around the world. By inserting \u201csales metrics and menu design\u201d into a large language model like ChatGPT, Vongerichten says that his restaurants can determine which dishes belong on a menu and which don\u2019t, and which should be prioritized to maximize profits. Ben Triola, the executive chef at the Chloe, in New Orleans, told<\/a> Food & Wine that he used A.I. for inspiration to produce \u201cimages and ideas foreign to classically trained chefs by pulling ingredient pairings and plating ideas from across the world,\u201d an exercise that Vongerichten also confessed to implementing.<\/p>\n

One could argue that automating administrative tasks\u2014such as answering customer phone calls and handling reservations\u2014may save a business money and time, in turn allowing its staff to devote their energies to food preparation and culinary experimentation. But employing A.I. to \u201ccollaborate\u201d on recipes and menu development seems to eschew a fundamental element of preparing and sharing food. \u201cThe food we make for ourselves, and for our people, reflects where we come from and what we turn to for comfort,\u201d the celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson wrote, in a 2023 essay<\/a> for the Times. \u201cIt shows love and respect. It is a language that is learned.\u201d Such is a common, almost clich\u00e9d, refrain among professional and home cooks: the most nourishing, affirming food contains some ineffable concoction of soul and spirit and ingenuity. Although the essayist William Deresiewicz has argued against romanticizing food<\/a>, writing that food cannot be considered art because it \u201cdoes not speak\u201d and houses no philosophical ambiguity, a dish can nonetheless communicate a whole slew of subterranean meanings: a family or geographical history; a long-forgotten memory; a feeling of almost inexorable exaltation or disgust. For this reason, Triola\u2019s belief that a machine\u2019s aggregation acumen presents chefs with an innovative tool for designing recipes strikes me as misguided. Just as an L.L.M. pulls \u201cimages and ideas\u201d from literary texts yet produces vapid and meaningless \u201cliterature\u201d of its own, a statistical model can pair flavors and ingredients without conveying any of the essential spirit or experience needed to make a dish sing. It is food not as culture, and not even as science, but as math.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What do we hope to communicate when we film and photograph food? In his 1957 collection, \u201cMythologies,\u201d Roland…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":757805,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,33436,4308,1991,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-757804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence-a-i","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-food","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=757804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757804\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/757805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=757804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=757804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=757804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}