Appalling AI menu pictures keep going viral. But what makes them so revolting?

LOS ANGELES — Adaeze Onejeme, a 28-year-old ad sales worker in Los Angeles, was visiting a night market in Hollywood with her sister in late August when she noticed something curious. Stall after stall, hawking loaded French fries or taquitos or smoothies, featured menus with pictures that at first seemed real — until she looked closer and noticed a too-perfect, almost rubbery aesthetic. "I was like, 'Those don't look like chicken nuggets. Those don't look like typical food that we eat,'" Onejeme said.

Describing what she encountered as an "AI flyer epidemic," Onejeme filmed videos of some of the market stalls and she shared them on TikTok. Then, instead of patronizing one of the vendors using artificial intelligence on their menus, she settled on buying some fries and lemonade from stores advertising their food the old-fashioned way.

"Not too long ago, people would just take a picture of the food and that would be on the menu. Now, these AI-generated pictures — the saturation, the coloring, the texture. It's like you don't even know what you're going to get when it comes out," Onejeme said in an interview. "At that point, is it false advertising?"

Generative AI has quickly become prevalent in marketing, particularly in illustrations or videos, to the discomfort or disdain of many beholders. In the dining scene, whether at food trucks or bodegas, diners or cafes, the use of "AI slop menus," as some TikTokers have dubbed them, can signify qualities people generally don't want to associate with food: low quality, laziness or, well, slop.

"Food is important to us," said Alexander Diel, a psychologist at Germany's University of Duisburg-Essen, who is among a team of scientists investigating the public's responses to AI-generated photos of food. "At the same time, it's something that can easily make us sick, so we are very sensitive to when something is even slightly off."

AI-generated food advertisements have drawn particularly intense reactions. BuzzFeed described them as the "restaurant red flag that will keep people away," while Mashable declared them "nightmare fuel." In Food & Wine magazine, features editor Kat Kinsman complained the pictures were ruining her appetite. "I would rather see a photo of a sheet of notebook paper messily scrawled with the day's specials in the chef's own hand than feel the queasy upset as my eyes and brain try to meet across the uncanny valley of a dish I know cannot be real," Kinsman wrote, expressing a sentiment shared by many others online.

The phenomenon is not just limited to the U.S. In Tokyo, sandwiches are advertised with an image in which the bagel seems to be made of cobwebs and contains a tuna salad that appears to have been inserted via a piping bag. In Kuala Lumpur, a bowl of spaghetti marinara looks like perfectly arranged yarn or strings of Play-Doh. And in Berlin, various lunch options seem to include a plastic-looking quiche with holes or a penne pasta made from rubber.

"I see a lot of AI food and it just looks a bit shiny and strange, but there's something particularly alien and wrong with this one," said 30-year-old tour guide Julia Damphouse, who took the viral photo of the Berlin restaurant billboard last month after first noticing it earlier in summer. "There is something wrong with it. It looks too geometric. I imagine that's it's like if you take acid and food stops looking like food."

AI pictures of food seem to be up against the same problem as images of people or animals: the so-called uncanny valley. First introduced as a concept by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, the uncanny valley is the term given to eerie or repellent feelings that can be triggered within people when they are confronted with slight imperfections in humanlike figures.

Admittedly, though, some of the most viral images of AI food menus don't just contain slight imperfections; they're alienlike catastrophes. "It stopped us in our tracks," said Sam Biddle, a technology reporter at the Intercept who took a widely shared photo of a supposed shrimp scampi dish at a deli he visited in August, featuring circular creatures that Biddle later compared to monsters from the works of sci-fi writer HP Lovecraft. "It wasn't just unappetizing — which, you know, it is — but it was also sort of spiritually unsettling and cosmically unnerving."

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