A lot of people are going to say "hey, real food photography is complicated and costly". I'm a photographer, yeah, I believe it can be tricky to get a nice proper and appetising photo of a dish that is so good that you can actually use it in a high profile print ad.

But for web based menus, where most people just see a thumbnail size photo anyway, it really doesn't take all that much to take an adequate photo. The photos shown here could have easily been taken on crap smartphones - you know, if they had done them in real life.

Also, you could just use a stock photo. Maybe it doesn't match the real product, but neither does the AI image.

Because idiots love AI

And they still look gross

I saw a cooking video on YT yesterday where the thumbnail was an AI image. They are literally filming the cooking of the actual food and have the result right there on video, and they made an AI pic of a fake version of it where the rice grains were all regularly shaped and distributed and looked like plastic.

Funny how AI is actually a good tool for cropping and resizing product pictures for webpages. No-skill tasks that takes much time to do manually.

And they just didn't use it for that. Well fucking done.

It's a perfect example of powerful tools in the hands of imbeciles, which is the trademark of AI.

Weird that they'd label it AI. But I appreciate the honesty, at least.

I would bet the restaurant isn't responsible for the AI images. More likely the restaurant didn't upload images and the app "helpfully" generated an image for them. The owners of the restaurant probably either have no idea that this happened or have bigger things to worry about.

I wonder how genAI product image gonna fly in Japan, i heard they're required to display the actual image of the food inside the package.

A fucking fiver just for chips? Jesus Christ. I know I've been away from the UK a while but that still seems crazy.

I don't think I need a photo of a plate of chips to tell me what chips look like.

That battered sausage picture is giving me "feelings."

That sausage looks like a poo I just had. Sauce and all.

Curry? It’s gravy ffs; that’s totally Poutine.

The “battered sausage” looks egregious, no thank you. My German roots say nah.

Also, AI food to me is an automatic scam call. Like, if you didn’t cook it, and you let a CPU “imagine” it, fuck you. Eating is the most basic human thing we do, ffs, and applying a camera before eating isn’t fucking hard. Scam.

Some of these food delivery apps offer customers discounts if they upload high quality photos of individual food items so that they can be added to the menu in the app. For example, here's DoorDash's policy: https://help.doordash.com/en-us/consumers/article/photo-incentives-faq

I suspect what happened here is that the restaurant didn't upload any of these photos. The real photos came from customers. But some items didn't have high quality photos from customers yet, so the app uses AI ones instead.

They're AI because that's cheaper than the usual: Plastic

those last two have the same background