Looks as though the end is near of what’s been a fun time for online resto critics… Restaurateurs are fighting back against AI ‘FoodSlop’ photos many establishments have been using on their menus and in their advertising…
They asked for a regular Breakfast Burrito… And got the Zombie Apocalypse version…
‘FoodSlop’ is what the masses have quickly agreed to call rally bad AI-generated photos of restaurant menu items. These ridiculous ‘photos’ make a mockery of the dishes they appear next to.
Looked good on paper…
If I was the proprietor of a resto whose menu consultant had dreamed up an AI-enabled graphic arts plan… I’d certainly take a closer look at the results in mock-up form than a whole lot of small outfits have over the past six months or so, before green-lighting them.
Relying on the written descriptions of the menu items, AI ‘specialists’ let their ‘systems’ loose to cre-ate pictures of them.
The idea was a sound one, on paper. Ask AI systems specially tuned to ‘food’ to produce inexpensive ‘professional quality’ images to feature on menus, in ads and on posters for smaller restaurants that couldn’t afford to hire the big agencies that chains like McDonald’s use.
The results were, more often than not, ridiculous at minimum, and downright horrendous at the ex-treme. Other adjectives used to describe AI food pix have included ‘creepy’, ‘sludgy’, ‘waxy’ and ‘bizarre’. The term that’s evolved in common used by the masses is… ‘AI Foodslop’.
Just shoot me…
What really gets me is, many of the victims of the AI FoodSlop apocalypse went ahead and had the posters and menus and ads produced and distributed where people could actually see them. If it had been me, I’d have said, “Just shoot me…” And refused to pay the AI ‘geniuses’ for their hopelessly shoddy work.
Massive backlash
No wonder there was such massive backlash from the public – both against the restaurateurs and the AI contractors who failed them so badly.
But all was not lost. In fact, a small group of independent rest operators formed a ‘self-defense’ co-alition, signing a pledge not to use any AI-generated material to promote their businesses. They posted photos of themselves outside their eateries, holding hand-made signs stating the pledge.
The group went viral when 404 Media, a website that follows advertising fails, featured them in a post last August. Since then, the movement supporting real food images in resto advertising has exploded.
Now, fans are declaring their affinity to the rebel restaurateurs by posting photos of themselves holding ‘love letters’, pledging not to patronize eateries that continue to use ‘fake’ images.
My take
I still can’t understand why cash-strapped indie restaurateurs would go ahead and use such unbe-lievably crappy, other-worldly – let’s face it: bizarre! – images to represent their eateries. And it ap-pears they’re not talking. Granted… In their place, I’d be hunkering down in a ‘safe house’ somewhere until the storm blew over, too.
My big question for those who published their AI fails: What are you going to do next to try to redeem yourselves?
~ Maggie J.