Throw a rock in New York City, and apparently you\u2019ll hit an AI food ad.<\/p>\n
At least that was X user Maggie Moda\u2019s assessment after spotting a series of peculiar sidewalk signs outside the city\u2019s delis and caf\u00e9s in a post that has since racked up 2.8 million views. There were croissant sandwiches with almost comically perfect layers, an affogato with a side of random holes, and a chopped-cheese hero with cheese melted a little too perfectly over every piece of meat.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Generative AI is giving restaurants a cheap and remarkably easy alternative to photographing the food they sell. For small businesses without the time or money for professional food photography, that can be a real advantage. But the backlash to AI food ads reveals a paradox: Some customers would rather see an imperfect picture of a meal that actually existed than a polished one that didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
That distinction matters beyond whether AI food looks gross. Restaurants have been making food look better in advertisements for decades, but generative AI makes it possible to advertise a photorealistic meal that never existed at all. And because that imaginary meal is being used to sell a real product to real customers, it raises an old question in a new way. How different can the food in the ad be from the food on the plate before it becomes deceptive?<\/p>\n
The closer you look at an AI ad, the less it resembles lunch and the more it starts to trigger trypophobia\u2014the fear of a pattern of holes. Sandwiches contain identical holes and repeating ingredients. One viral burrito has so many tiny holes that the internet simply christened it the \u201ctrypophobia burrito.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other ads, cheese melts without an obvious beginning or end. Ingredients multiply into unnaturally neat rows. Croissants achieve levels of flakiness that seem to defy structural engineering. The images have become recognizable enough to earn their own unappetizing nickname: food slop. And not the sloppy Joe kind\u2014AI slop.<\/p>\n
The business case for AI slop<\/p>\n
To restaurants, though, the appeal isn\u2019t difficult to understand. Professional-looking food advertising no longer necessarily requires professional food photography.<\/p>\n
When Grind & Unwind opened on San Francisco\u2019s Haight Street in May, owners AJ and Lyndsey Lozano put a temporary menu in the window featuring AI-generated images of the restaurant\u2019s food while they got the new business up and running, according to SFGATE. The internet was not impressed. A Reddit post titled \u201cYum, slop\u201d drew more than 670 upvotes, with commenters comparing the focaccia to a \u201cloofah\u201d and a \u201clung.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the reason for the AI images was considerably less dramatic than the backlash. Lozano told SFGATE the pictures were only supposed to be temporary while the couple opened their first restaurant and cared for three children under 5.<\/p>\n
A Chicago deli offered essentially the same explanation. Chi-Town Deli manager Ali Malik told Business Insider that its AI-generated sandwich images were temporary while the restaurant waited for a new sign featuring actual photographs.<\/p>\n
Before AI slop, there were mashed potatoes\u00a0<\/p>\n
For all the futuristic weirdness, fake food in advertising is remarkably old. In the 1965 Supreme Court case FTC v. Colgate-Palmolive Co., the justices even contemplated a familiar advertising trick: using mashed potatoes as a stand-in for ice cream.<\/p>\n
The fake food itself wasn\u2019t necessarily the problem. Rebecca Tushnet, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in advertising and trademark law, told Fortune that advertisers can use images that aren\u2019t real as long as they don\u2019t mislead consumers about what they\u2019re buying.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf a reasonable consumer would understand that the image was making actual claims about the composition or quality of the food, then that could be deceptive,\u201d she said. But if it\u2019s simply showing the general kind of thing a customer will get, \u201cthen it is not likely to be deceptive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Generative AI makes that old distinction considerably stranger. Instead of mashed potatoes pretending to be ice cream, restaurants can now advertise food that never sat in front of a camera at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe image itself can make a claim about the product\u2019s size, quantity, ingredients, quality, or appearance, even if the ad never says those things in words,\u201d Libby O\u2019Neill, partner and deputy chair of advertising, marketing and promotions at Loeb & Loeb LLP, told Fortune.<\/p>\n
And an \u201cAI-generated\u201d label isn\u2019t necessarily a get-out-of-jail-free card. \u201cIt explains how the image was made; it does not correct a false impression about what is actually being sold,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Her rule of thumb is simpler: \u201cSell the product you depict, and depict the product you sell.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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