The strange comfort of AI food slop

FastCompany: The cheeseburger on the La Quinta Inn room service handout immediately made my AI antennae tingle. The image—oddly symmetrical, bright, and busy—had something artificial about it. Maybe it was the cheese dripping over the patty in suspiciously triangular form, or the unnatural placement of the accoutrements, but it looked as if a burger emoji made a wish to become real food, and that wish was only half-granted. While off-putting, the faux burger wasn’t anywhere close to the gastronomic calamities that have been spreading online lately. A buffet of viral food images have been circulating (again) and none of them are appetizing.

What goes viral is the worst of the uncanny worst: incomprehensible chicken thighs , clustered hive-like burritos , bizarrely circular shrimp . While the images are the opposite of appetizing, there’s a comfort in our ability to immediately clock them as AI. But experts say that’s quickly changing. AI has already permeated much of the food styling and photography world (at least outside of high-end production), and it’s only going to become more common and more sophisticated. As AI image generators sort out their kinks when it comes to rendering food, we’re on the cusp of a system completely dominated by AI.

Why AI image generators struggle with food Imagine a typical bowl of penne pasta: Tubular noodles lie in a helter-skelter pile, covered unevenly in sauce and grated Parmesan cheese. As a piece of imagery, pasta is textured, random, and full of varied details—and it’s exactly the kind of thing that AI image generators have historically had trouble reproducing. According to Ahmed Elgammal, professor of computer science at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, current off-the-shelf image generators tend to use a stable diffusion model, which compresses images to save computing power.

“You are actually generating a very, very small tiny image and then you’re blowing it up later and trying to fill in the details,” Elgammal says. Treating those missing features like an afterthought leads to strange results. “That’s where food basically falls apart,” Elgammal says. “Food is full of details, and our eyes are looking at all these details because that’s how we tell good food from bad food or how we tell the quality of the food.” Many of the surrealist AI food images we’re seeing are the result of a circular system of unrealistic food imagery that has been around for decades.

Long before AI, companies would use practical effects. Campbell’s Soup famously added marbles to its bowls in advertisements to ensure its ingredients rose to the surface—one of a cornucopia of tricks food stylists have up their sleeves to make a photo drool-worthy through less-than-edible means. And the addition of Photoshop and other postproduction digital technology made it even easier to render a perfect-looking meal. The images conjured by AI draw on that history of unrealistic depictions of food.

To come up with a yolky egg sandwich or a tuna melt, for example, AI models pull from preexisting images of these dishes and similar food items. Many are hyper-stylized, so they already have a sheen of the less real; others are preexisting AI images with their own issues. When they’re averaged together, they can create something a bit too otherworldly to pass muster. Food has “so many variations,” says Hanseok Ko, an engineering professor at Catholic University who focuses on AI.

Article truncated for readability. Read the full piece →

The article discusses the significant impact of AI on food branding, which is a growing trend in the industry, making it highly relevant and moderately novel.