Please stop putting AI-generated food on restaurant menus
Restaurants are swapping real dish photos for cheap AI-generated images — and diners are pushing back hard. Viral "AI slop" menus look uncanny, erode trust, and make people less likely to eat there. If you please stop putting aigenerated food on signs, you may keep customers who still prefer imperfect, human-made photos.
Key Takeaways
- AI-generated food photos on menus and flyers have gone viral for all the wrong reasons, from shrimp-shaped bagels to honeycomb burger buns.
- Diners say the images kill appetite and trust; some vow never to eat at spots that use "AI slop" advertising.
- Small businesses are now going viral by promising handmade, non-AI marketing — a throwback to letterboards and cardboard signs.
- Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting a wider fatigue with low-quality AI content.
- Platforms from Pinterest to LinkedIn are adding tools so users can escape generative-AI clutter.
Over a recent weekend, tech reporter Sam Biddle shared a deli sign that looked less like lunch and more like a nightmare. Glossy, shrimp-shaped bagels sat on a pile of noodles beside pasta that looked too perfectly round and sandwiches whose ingredients seemed to melt together. "The death of folk graphic design in favor of AI slop across our country's delis is leading to some incredibly Lovecraftian food horrors," he wrote on X.
The post hit a nerve. Soon, people flooded replies with their own cursed sightings from delis, restaurants, food trucks, fairs, and even mailboxes: cheesesteaks fused into one shiny mass, burgers with porous buns, fillings that looked like mushrooms or tentacles. For anyone who grew up with hand-lettered specials boards, the shift feels like a tiny cultural loss — and that nostalgia is why the backlash sticks. Browse more then-and-now culture stories at BlasterPost's Nostalgia: Then & Now hub.
Why are restaurants using AI food photos at all?
Money is the blunt answer. Communications executive Jules Mossler noted online that small businesses often operate on "razor thin" margins, so tools that promise cheaper, more "professional" ads can look irresistible. The problem is what gets erased: the handmade quirks people actually like about local spots.
"We want the sign you and your sister made; the misspellings, the chipped paint," Mossler wrote. She added that many people struggle to articulate why these images leave them "deeply sad." X user Adam Johnson put it another way: quirky, low-budget signage is being replaced by "grotesque, uncanny monoslop," and "a small piece of culture is dying."
That framing matters for a Then & Now audience. Menus once sold food with imperfect photos, marker boards, and folk design. Now some owners outsource the appetite cue to a generator — and the internet is saying please stop putting aigenerated pictures where a real plate should be.
Why does AI-generated food look so uncanny?
Food photography has always involved styling and edits. AI introduces a different disconnect. Viewers describe trypophobia triggers — clusters of holes and bumps that ruin appetite. On Reddit, commenters compared displays to mold, bugs, intestines, and "sentient fungus," saying everything looked grown into place rather than prepared.
Text can make it worse. According to a Food & Wine column cited in coverage of the trend, an apparent AI menu advertised dishes such as "Crslay Fried Mussels Pot Ksascte Barno" and "Homemade ice Croams." Social feeds are also flooded with impossible recipe videos — cheese pulls that defy physics, contradictory steps, dishes nobody can recreate. A writer at The Cut spent a week cooking recipes that appeared to use AI and ended up with eggy "breadsticks" and zucchini "crackers" that burned outside while staying soft inside.
Looking gross is only half the problem. Trust collapses next. "Please know that if you're a restaurant that uses AI slop to sell your food, I automatically do not trust you and will not eat at your establishment," one X user wrote. Others said a plain letterboard would beat a glossy synthetic sign every time.
Have any restaurants already paid the price?
Yes. Grind & Unwind, a café and bar in San Francisco's Haight neighborhood, was called out on Reddit after commenters compared its AI focaccia to a loofah, likened a croissant to alien larva, and said pulled pork and coleslaw looked like something from The Last of Us. Owners confirmed to SFGATE that the AI display was meant to be temporary.
"The response was not what we were expecting," co-owner Lyndsey Lozano said. Criticism spilled offline when the awning was vandalized; the shop later swapped the AI window for real pastries.
In Toronto, posters at the Canadian National Exhibition for items like a "KD Smoothie" and a "Cotton Chick Buldak Ramen Taco" sparked another round of texture-and-ingredient scrutiny, with Redditors betting how many AI posters they would spot at the fair.
Elsewhere, the counter-trend is the new flex. Rachel Karten of the Substack Link In Bio noted that small businesses are going viral by promising not to use AI ads. Chugwater Soda Fountain in Wyoming posted a handwritten cardboard sign reading, "We will not be using AI flyers or photos to promote ourselves," captioned "From-scratch food and from-scratch marketing."
As of Aug. 25, that post had more than 71,000 likes. GOAT Nantwich, a UK bar, shared a similar handwritten pledge. The anti-AI note is still marketing — but it proves how fast the shortcut became something owners feel pressure to disavow.
Is this just about menus, or a bigger AI-slop fatigue?
Menus are the latest flashpoint in a wider revolt. "AI slop" means low-quality, mass-produced generative content made to fill feeds or cut costs — fake celebrity photos, generic posts, impossible ads. Mashable's reporting places the restaurant backlash inside that exhaustion. Merriam-Webster chose "slop" as its 2025 Word of the Year, defining it as digital content of low quality usually produced in quantity by artificial intelligence.
Platforms are responding. Pinterest added controls to request fewer generative AI images and expanded them to food and drink. Snapchat said fully AI-generated videos would no longer qualify for Spotlight recommendations. LinkedIn introduced a "Seems like AI slop" flag that more than a million people reportedly used in its first few weeks.
People are tired of playing detective in their feeds — and they especially do not want to do it while choosing lunch.
Then: a chipped-paint specials board and a slightly messy photo of today's soup. Now: uncanny shrimp bagels and menus that look back at you. The ask from diners is simple — make the food, put it on a plate, take a picture. It does not have to be perfect; it just has to be real.