Restaurants, Stop Serving Us AI Slop

Scrolling through reels of food spots and restaurant ads online, I couldn’t help but notice something off about the restaurants themselves.

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You can usually guess what the menu will look like when you walk into a local restaurant. You’ll find faded photos of food taken 20 years ago. The burger looks a little greasy, even under dim lighting. And there’s some dirt around the edges where the lamination has started peeling off.

But nobody ever really minded it. In fact, customers trusted it. You knew the guy behind the counter made that exact plate of food, took a picture of it, and stuck it on the board.

It was proof of work.

Now, walk down that same street or open any delivery app. Everything is turning into fake, strange AI slop.

Scroll through social media, and you can find burgers with glossy buns stacked sky-high, worm-like noodles, and perfectly round, plastic-looking pizzas.

At best, it looks fake. At worst, it’s downright revolting.

“AI slop across our country’s delis is leading to some incredibly Lovecraftian food horrors,” one X user said of grilled shrimp that looked like shiny, glazed donuts.

“This is the one that’s been giving me ‘the mega horrors,’” said another over a burrito seemingly filled with cobwebs.

“Has anyone told restauranteurs that they don’t need to use the ‘crawling with maggots’ setting when they ai generate their foods images,” one X user asked about a nightmarish ad for chicken and rice.

Now, I’m not a tech doomer. I want software that innovates and automates boring tasks. Technological progress is what raises our standard of living. When developers find ways to cut real costs and make businesses more efficient, that’s great for everyone.

There are plenty of places where tech actually helps restaurants. Smart inventory tracking reduces waste, better supply software lowers costs, and automated ordering saves everyone time. That kind of tech lowers prices and lets chefs spend more time actually cooking. Good innovation makes the real product better.

The problem here isn’t the tech itself. The problem is that people still don’t really understand the market in which restaurants operate.

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Prices, reviews, and product displays are how buyers and sellers communicate transparently. When a person looks at a menu, they aren’t just looking at pretty pictures (or, in the case of AI slop, the opposite of pretty). They are judging the quality and portion size, and eating the food with their eyes.

When a restaurant puts an AI-generated burger on their board outside, none of that happens.

A picture snapped on an iPhone says, “We cooked this today, and this is what we will serve you.” An AI picture says, “We haven’t made this dish, we don’t know what it looks like in real life, and we used up our image credits on ChatGPT to show you, sorry.”

It’s a perfect way to destroy trust before the food is even on the table. When a restaurant won’t even show you the real food they make in their own kitchen, it begs a few questions. Why would you believe that the meat is actually fresh? That the kitchen is actually clean? That the cook really washed their hands?

For thousands of years, people survived by recognizing bad meat and mold before eating it. Humans have a built-in disgust reflex against organic things that look almost right, but slightly wrong.

Because an algorithm has no idea what food actually is, the food doesn’t look tasty. It triggers revulsion.

Sure, the images will probably get better over the next few months. But that still misses the entire point.

You can’t trick humans into wanting to eat something that doesn’t exist.

If restaurants want people to actually walk through their doors instead of just scrolling past, they need to bring back the one thing we all seem to have forgotten: being real.

Samiksha Bhattacharjee is the Head of Ladies of Liberty Alliance UK, a Young Voices UK contributor, and the President of the University College London Libertarian Society. You can find more of her work at Samiksha’s State of the Debate.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

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