Restaurants Face Growing Customer Backlash Over Disturbing AI-Generated Food Photos on Menus

Restaurants face backlash over AI-generated food photos

Food photos are supposed to make you hungry, but the ones currently haunting social media look more likely to crawl off the menu than end up on a plate. Over the weekend, tech reporter Sam Biddle shared a deli sign featuring what appears to be a dozen glossy, shrimp-shaped bagels sitting on a pile of noodles. Other dishes on the menu included perfectly round piles of pasta, strangely smooth sandwiches, and ingredients that seemed to melt into one another. "The death of folk graphic design in favor of AI slop across our country's delis is leading to some incredibly Lovecraftian food horrors," Biddle wrote on X. The post struck a nerve. Soon, users were flooding the replies and quote posts with their own equally cursed sightings of apparent AI-generated food ads in delis, restaurants, food trucks, fairs, and even their mailboxes. Some shared menus filled with suspiciously perfect cheesesteaks and sandwiches whose ingredients seemed to fuse together. Others posted burgers with porous, honeycomb-like buns and fillings resembling mushrooms or tentacles. "More AI flyer slop menus. They're popping up everywhere and it seems to be getting worse and worse," one user said. The conversation was not limited to restaurants. "Quirky, low-budget signage is being replaced by this grotesque, uncanny monoslop," X user Adam Johnson wrote. "Not the biggest injustice in the world, but a small piece of culture is dying." That idea -- that something small but distinctly human is being lost -- appeared repeatedly throughout the conversation. Communications executive Jules Mossler acknowledged online why a small business with "razor thin" margins might turn to tools promising cheaper, more professional advertising. But she argued that doing so can erase the handmade details people actually like about local businesses. "We want the sign you and your sister made; the misspellings, the chipped paint," Mossler wrote on X. "I don't think people know how to articulate why [these AI images] leave you deeply sad," she added. The internet is already fed up with AI slop The restaurant backlash is part of a much larger revolt against the synthetic material flooding the internet. "AI slop" generally refers to low-quality, mass-produced generative AI content created to fill feeds, attract clicks, or make a quick buck. It can take the form of generic LinkedIn posts, fake celebrity photos, impossible animal-rescue videos, nonsensical recipes, or advertisements filled with people and products that never existed. The term has become so inescapable that Merriam-Webster selected "slop" as its 2025 Word of the Year, defining it as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." People are not simply complaining about it anymore. Platforms are beginning to respond to users who want less AI-generated material in their feeds. Pinterest introduced controls that let people request fewer generative AI images, eventually expanding the setting to its food and drink category. Snapchat announced that fully AI-generated videos would no longer qualify for recommendations on Spotlight. LinkedIn is introducing a "Seems like AI slop" option that allows users to flag posts they consider generic or machine-made. More than 1 million people reportedly used the button within its first few weeks. That broader exhaustion helps explain why the restaurant menus struck such a nerve. People are already tired of examining every image and video in their feeds for signs that it is fake. They especially do not want to play detective while deciding what to eat for lunch. AI food looks like food...until it doesn't Food photography has always involved a certain amount of fakery. Professional stylists carefully arrange ingredients, manipulate lighting, and edit photos to make dishes look more appealing. But an AI-generated food image introduces a different disconnect -- and an uncanny effect. The effect is apparently strong enough to provoke a physical response. Reddit threads featuring these images are filled with mentions of trypophobia, an aversion to clusters of small holes or bumps. "Gah it gives me trypophobia -- kinda ruins my appetite," one commenter wrote beneath photos of an AI-generated restaurant display in San Francisco. In a separate r/antiai thread, commenters compared the pictured food to mold, bugs, intestines, brain matter, and diseases. "Everything looks like it was grown into position; nothing prepared or assembled," one user wrote, describing it as "more creature or sentient fungus than food." Generated text can make matters even worse. According to a Food & Wine column, an apparent AI-created restaurant menu advertised dishes including "Crslay Fried Mussels Pot Ksascte Barno" and "Homemade ice Croams." AI is also creating problems before food ever reaches a menu. Social media platforms are filling up with generated recipe videos depicting impossible cheese pulls, contradictory instructions, and finished dishes that cannot be recreated. Earlier this year, a writer at The Cut spent a week cooking recipes that appeared to use AI. The results included garlic "breadsticks" that became an eggy sheet and zucchini "crackers" that remained soft in the middle while burning around the edges. One of the few recipes that tasted good appeared to have been copied almost word-for-word from a human food blogger. Looking gross is only part of the problem. Many people participating in the online conversation said that seeing AI-generated food made them less likely to trust the restaurant. "Please know that if you're a restaurant that uses AI slop to sell your food, I automatically do not trust you and will not eat at your establishment," one X user wrote. Others argued that having no pictures would be preferable to showing a synthetic version of what a dish might look like. Another post contrasted a plain, old-fashioned letterboard menu with a glossy AI-generated sign, asking how to explain to small-business owners that the simple menu was "one billion times more appealing." Some restaurants are getting doxxed. Grind & Unwind, a new café and bar in San Francisco's Haight neighborhood, got exposed in the subreddit r/sanfrancisco back in July when commenters compared its AI-generated focaccia to a loofah, said a croissant looked like an alien larva, and described the pulled pork and coleslaw as something straight out of The Last of Us. The restaurant's owners confirmed to SFGATE that the display used AI-generated images and was intended to be temporary. "It was kind of a stir on Haight Street, which is good and bad, I guess," co-owner Lyndsey Lozano said. "But the response was not what we were expecting." The online criticism eventually spilled into the real world when the restaurant's awning was vandalized. The owners have since removed the AI display and replaced it with a window showcasing the restaurant's actual pastries. The debate moved up North: Posters advertising food at Toronto's Canadian National Exhibition recently prompted another online conversation over apparent AI use. Images promoting items, including a "KD Smoothie" and a "Cotton Chick Buldak Ramen Taco," drew as much attention for their strange textures and inconsistent ingredients as for the food concepts themselves. Reddit users were already placing bets on how many AI posters they would find around the fair. Other restaurants appear to be reading the room. As Rachel Karten, writer of Substack Link In Bio, pointed out, small businesses are now going viral by publicly promising not to use AI-generated advertising. The Chugwater Soda Fountain in Chugwater, Wyoming, shared a photo of an employee holding a handwritten cardboard sign reading, "We will not be using AI flyers or photos to promote ourselves." "From-scratch food and from-scratch marketing," the restaurant wrote in the caption. As of Aug. 25, the post had received more than 71,000 likes. GOAT Nantwich, a bar in the UK, joined the trend with its own handwritten note promising: "We will not be using any AI posters to promote ourselves." The anti-AI declarations are still marketing, of course. But their popularity shows how quickly the use of AI has gone from a convenient shortcut to something businesses may feel the need to disavow. Restaurants once tried to make every image look as polished as possible. But now, it seems a piece of cardboard and imperfect handwriting can become their biggest selling point. Ultimately, the internet's request is not particularly complicated: make the food, put it on a plate, and take a picture. Restaurants, it's OK if it doesn't look perfect. At least it won't look back at us.

AI is killing folk graphic design, and the resulting "Lovecraftian horrors" are making people want to never eat out again

We've seen businesses complain about automatic AI-generated images thrust upon their products on platforms like Amazon, Reddit and Uber Eats. Some understandably fear that the fake imagery could harm their sales. What some people finding harder to fathom is why, at the same time, other companies are willfully using AI image generation themselves, even when it produces nightmarish depictions of what they're selling. Small restaurants, delis and food trucks seem to be particular culprits. On social media, people have been posting images of depicting bizarre, sometime downright nasty-looking menu items, and it's making people nostalgic for the days of bad amateur Photoshop jobs. Writing on X, a technology reporter recently suggested that AI image generation is killing the great tradition of 'folk graphic design' at small eateries. He backed up that claim with photos from a deli that appears to serve instant noodles topped with a hiterto undocumented species of headless and tailless shrimp. Amateur menu design might not always have been very good, but it had its charm. Even when the food photography wasn't the most flattering, there was something to be said for its honesty: you knew what you were getting. With AI-generated food imagery, can you demand a refund if your dish doesn't come topped with a radioactive creature? Lots of other people have jumped on the thread to share their own evidence of AI food nightmares. A word of warning to anyone who suffers from trypophobia (disgust at clustered patterns of holes and bumps): the alien textures in some of these images may make you never want to eat out again. Some people have the attitude that if a restaurant uses imagery like this, they're staying well away. "This is a matter of detail orientation and quality control. If this is the level of your attention to detail and your ability to manage quality, no way am I putting anything you make in my mouth," one person writes. "I hope all the restaurants who do this are preparing for bankruptcy within the year because nobody wants to eat radioactive food that looks like it was made by brain damaged space aliens," another person comments. "I just don't understand what was wrong with whatever this deli already had before generative AI, only like what, two three years ago? An old photo is better than this. Written text without picture is surely better than this," someone else says. It seems AI menus have become their own genre of AI nightmare fuel, up there with AI children's books. Many of us expected this might happen. Despite the worst fears about AI, design agencies remain in business because large companies and brands generally don't want to make their customers feel sick of associate themselves with AI slop (although Coca-Cola and Skechers have turned out to be exceptions). But smaller businesses that might otherwise have hired an independent freelancer or handled design internally using whatever resources they had see easy access to AI image generators as a time saver. They might need to realise that the hassle of taking photos was worth the time and effort to avoid creeping out potential customers.