Do These AI-Generated Food Images Look Appetizing to You?

“This two-dozen bagel box where they sliced off the bottoms is crazy looking. Do you see that?”

Emily Winston, founder of mega-popular chain Boichik Bagels, is looking at her own catering page through third-party platform Forkable. In recent weeks, Forkable updated its site, changing most of the photos for catered food featured on the site to AI-generated images, only notifying restaurant owners via email after the images had already been changed. Winston is looking at an AI-generated photo of a box of what’s meant to be her bagels: two dozen bagels tilted on their sides with what looks to be the bottom fourth of the bagel sliced off. Beneath it sit three containers of schmear flavors labeled “chive,” “lox,” and, hmm, “pink label.” An AI photo of packaged nova lox also gives pause — “This lox that’s like a perfect rectangle is creepy and wrong,” Winston says — as do photos of perfectly round bagels, with evenly spread toppings of, in one instance, sesame seeds.

Criticizing more of the images uploaded to her catering page, Winston sounds audibly put off by the look of each photo. “It’s very uncanny valley,” Winston says. Calling the whole thing “creepy,” Winston adds, “If you’re ordering off a menu, you want it to look like the actual food — it just doesn’t look right. ... It looks like you’re ordering fake, fake food.”

Eater SF reviewed two copies of an email sent by Forkable to vendors on Monday, November 17, noting the change to AI-generated images. In that email, Forkable stated the AI-generated images are meant “to improve image quality and consistency.” The email went on to inform restaurant owners and caterers that if they prefer to use high-quality images they own, they could upload those photos back to their accounts.

Judging by a view of the Forkable page, a few restaurants have already swapped their photos back, but the majority of photos remain unchanged. Others seemed to be in the process of changing their photos, much like Boichik’s team, who moved to change the images quickly after Eater SF reached out. Although they got the email notification about the photo swap, the fact that the onus was placed on restaurant owners to change out the AI images added to the business owner’s frustrations; Winston confirmed that Boichik already had its own photos loaded to the site prior to the AI, er, glow up. “I feel like they absolutely could have offered it as a service and you can opt in,” Winston says, “but I’m not happy that they just went and did it on their own.”

In response to requests for an interview, Forkable co-founder and president Nick Naczinski provided a brief statement via email acknowledging the misstep. “Honestly, given how central Forkable is to office lunch, corporate events, and catering, we moved too quickly,” he writes. “We’ve heard the feedback, and we’re returning to traditional photography. We still believe limited use of AI-enhanced imagery can improve the experience for customers and restaurants as we expand globally, and we’re committed to getting the balance right.”

On the consumer side of things, however, Forkable customer Ian Larue expressed his disappointment with the company, reaching out to Eater SF about the change. Larue says his office regularly works with Forkable to cater meals, and as a self-described “AI skeptic,” he found the switch jarring. “My immediate reaction was shock and horror,” he says. “We have a very active Slack community at work, and lots of people began posting as soon as they saw [the AI-generated images]: ‘Am I going crazy or does that not look like food?’”

He separately contacted some restaurant owners about their AI images on Forkable, most of whom he says didn’t realize their photos had changed at all and were grateful that Larue informed them. In Larue’s estimation of the situation, the change is problematic and perhaps even runs afoul of false advertising requirements. “If I’m a restaurant and I want to advertise my food with well-styled and probably expensive professional photography, now [as a customer] I can’t tell them apart,” he says. “It would be better if there were no images and all I had was text descriptions, because my reaction to what it looks like is, ‘This isn’t food. This looks like animation. It doesn’t look real.’ It is completely unappetizing.”

As a customer, he says he’s emailed Forkable about the situation, and says he refuses to order food if his only options are restaurant pages filled with AI-generated food images. He isn’t shy about his criticism of what he calls the “AI hype train.”

“I am hopeful and optimistic to see opportunities like this continue to shine through and pierce the illusion of untouchability that is pervasive right now in Silicon Valley in particular,” Larue says. “Nobody wants this outside of a few select applications. I will grant that AI is really good at certain classes of problems, but everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer phenomenon, which is what I think a lot of the hype and bubble around AI has turned into. It is just so ludicrous and so insipid on its face that I cannot wait for this nonsense to be over.”