You wander into a cafe and look at a menu with a variety of bagel sandwiches, but each illustration looks eerily flawless, precisely symmetrical, and oddly smooth, eliciting a visceral sensation that something isn’t right. You might think you’re paranoid, but you’re not losing your mind. Generative AI menus have hit the restaurant business courtesy of models courtesy of models trained on a narrow, “pleasing” aesthetic that produces a look that feels wrong even when you can’t articulate why.
Sometimes, these illustrations are egregiously fake, like a burrito with cheese so bubbly and melty that it looks more like avant garde art than lunch. More often, they’re so ordinary looking that you only notice something is wrong when you take a second to look more closely. The models then identify patterns in the datasets to predict what a user is looking for when they ask something like, “Make me a menu for a burger restaurant.” “A lot of this stuff looks like a Chili’s menu from 2015, and there’s a reason for that,” Lisle said.
It’s inevitable that some AI-generated content will seep into these incomprehensibly large data sets. But when AI models train on too much of their own AI-generated content, they risk model collapse. If someone asks an AI model to generate a menu for a fast food restaurant, the model will likely reference menus from Wendy’s, Burger King, McDonald’s, or another popular chain.
These menus already share a similar style, which means that the AI-generated outputs will mimic that same style, only to further reinforce it further if the AI-generated menu ends up back in training data. But menus and advertisements for food will always look better than the real thing, like a Big Mac in a McDonald’s commercial where each layer of the sandwich is arranged by a prop designer to look maximally appetizing. This effect can become even more pronounced in AI outputs.
On X, a user named Labtec showed what happens when you make a menu in ChatGPT, then edit it 100 times to see how the food continues to look less and less like it should. (We replicated the experiment and found similar results.) “The end result actually makes me uncomfortable,” Labtec wrote. Restaurants are likely falling victim to this problem, revising their AI-generated menus to alter small details over and over, like prices or item names. It seems that with each edit, the food images become a tiny bit more round and smooth.
Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany found that AI-generated food images exhibited an “uncanny valley” effect, where images of food that looked almost real elicited more disgust and unease than images that were obviously fake. That squeamishness only intensifies in light of the cultural context around AI. If people react to these images so negatively, then that’s probably reason enough for restaurants to stop trying to make AI menus work.
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