We’ve all seen it by now. The distorted omelettes. Melted butter that turns into something else. The unsettlingly literal shrimp toast. Scroll Instagram, TikTok, or Uber Eats and you’ll see a disturbing number of restaurants promoting themselves with AI-generated imagery. Generative AI’s creep into every aspect of life has unsettled me for plenty of reasons. The data centers and the brain rot, for sure, but I have also watched as my wife, an illustrator, loses work as editorial outlets choose AI “art” built off stolen copyrighted imagery, often reasoning human artists are too expensive. Damn those pesky living wages.
Outside my own ethics, AI art at a restaurant just has never made much practical business sense to me. If I’m looking to eat somewhere, the main thing I want to see on that restaurant’s social media (besides the address and hours of operation, for the love of god) is pictures of the actual food they make.
Some restaurateurs argue that using AI-generated imagery saves the money because they can’t afford a marketing team, and platforms like Uber Eats make it easier than ever to implement AI in photo editing. Others say that restaurants have used stock images for ages that don’t actually feature their food, or that food stylists make fast food look too good to be true.
But at the very least, stock images or food styling requires food to exist in the first place. I’m not the only one who finds seeing a crepe that looks like an MC Escher drawing unsettling. Recently, a bagel shop in South Burlington, Vermont faced backlash after posting an ad that used some AI-generated images. Food stylists have accused AI video generators of copying their work. Reddit is full of people trying to figure out if a particular menu image is AI-generated, vowing they won’t eat at that place if it is. “I've found places like this resort to AI images because the actual product made there is not good,” writes Garrett Palm in The Daily Meal. AI slop starts to feel indicative of actual slop.
As more restaurants turn to AI for their advertising, however, they could run up against a new challenge: the legal standard of false advertising. The Federal Trade Commission Act was first passed in 1914 to, among other things, prevent deceptive practices in commerce. It has been used to keep restaurants from claiming they use “local” seafood when they don’t, and against Arby’s for misrepresenting the quality of its roast beef through, yes, food styling. So it certainly seems that posting images of food (or people) that don't exist and claiming it’s what’s on the menu would count as deceptive.
To answer the question, we spoke to Laura Smith, the legal director at Truth in Advertising, a non-profit watchdog founded in 2012 and dedicated to protecting customers from scams and other deceptive practices, whether that’s going after Walmart for deceptive “Made in USA” labels, or filing an FTC complaint against Keurig Dr Pepper over the supposed recyclability of its coffee pods. The Federal Trade Commission is the agency responsible for overseeing any legal violations. Smith anticipates the rise in AI-generated ads will mean a rise in complaints about misleading imagery, and that AI risks pushing the line between embellishment and outright falsehood.