And they still look gross
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I think this is already most peoples reaction
I saw a cooking video on YT yesterday where the thumbnail was an AI image. They are literally filming the cooking of the actual food and have the result right there on video, and they made an AI pic of a fake version of it where the rice grains were all regularly shaped and distributed and looked like plastic.
The other day I uploaded a video of a recorded meeting, and I wondered what "suggest a thumbnail" did, so I clicked it. It's three AI-generated images based on the video. That's when I realized that all those YouTube thumbnails that look the same are made from that function.
Did they get rid of the function where you could choose your own frame out of a choice of three? If so, that's diabolical cause a random thumbnail sometimes sucks.
No, the choices to upload your own thumbnail or to select from a random three frames are still there. I was just curious to find out what "Suggest a thumbnail" was, since I figured the random ones were already essentially a "suggest a thumbnail". So I totality, the options are you can upload your own, three random frames, three gen-AI images.
Same thing with YouTube, they could just take a clip from the video if they really don't know how to make a thumbnail.
I would bet the restaurant isn't responsible for the AI images. More likely the restaurant didn't upload images and the app "helpfully" generated an image for them. The owners of the restaurant probably either have no idea that this happened or have bigger things to worry about.
Lieferando just rolled out that feature and basically every restaurant in our area is now flodded with these AI pictures. I’m not sure if they know if and how it can be deactivated.
Sometimes the restaurant didn't even put the item on their menu. The website decided to "fill in" what was "missing" from the menu. It's how some restaurants discover all sorts of things they didn't know they sold. Sometimes from a service they never even signed up for!
If they don’t know, they’re a bad manager.
Not necessarily. Lieferando is a terrible dogshit platform. I would not be surprised if that's a lieferando "feature" they rolled out without consent.
I don't think I need a photo of a plate of chips to tell me what chips look like.
Plus there is a good chance that the ai photo looks nothing like the actual food. I thought those looked like weird nachos until I saw the battered sausage and realized this is the other kind of chips.
Imagine getting a pic of nacho chips and cheese from some AI that doesn't know which chips and cheese means from text.
A fucking fiver just for chips? Jesus Christ. I know I've been away from the UK a while but that still seems crazy.
I mean, you are trying to get chips delivered to you. Which will make them horribly soggy from their own steam too...
I wonder how genAI product image gonna fly in Japan, i heard they're required to display the actual image of the food inside the package.
A lot of people are going to say "hey, real food photography is complicated and costly". I'm a photographer, yeah, I believe it can be tricky to get a nice proper and appetising photo of a dish that is so good that you can actually use it in a high profile print ad.
But for web based menus, where most people just see a thumbnail size photo anyway, it really doesn't take all that much to take an adequate photo. The photos shown here could have easily been taken on crap smartphones - you know, if they had done them in real life.
Also, you could just use a stock photo. Maybe it doesn't match the real product, but neither does the AI image.
Funny how AI is actually a good tool for cropping and resizing product pictures for webpages. No-skill tasks that takes much time to do manually.
And they just didn't use it for that. Well fucking done.
It's a perfect example of powerful tools in the hands of imbeciles, which is the trademark of AI.
i know right. i mean you do have to fight with the prompt. and it can mess up the resolution. and will often pick random formats that don't match the extension which breaks sites with strict security and some cdns. and wasted a ton of power in a datacenter.
but thank god I didnt have to spend 30sec in gimp to get exactly what i wanted.
What? Your phone gallery app can do that you know.
Some of these food delivery apps offer customers discounts if they upload high quality photos of individual food items so that they can be added to the menu in the app. For example, here's DoorDash's policy: https://help.doordash.com/en-us/consumers/article/photo-incentives-faq
I suspect what happened here is that the restaurant didn't upload any of these photos. The real photos came from customers. But some items didn't have high quality photos from customers yet, so the app uses AI ones instead.
That sausage looks like a poo I just had. Sauce and all.
Curry? It’s gravy ffs; that’s totally Poutine.
The “battered sausage” looks egregious, no thank you. My German roots say nah.
Also, AI food to me is an automatic scam call. Like, if you didn’t cook it, and you let a CPU “imagine” it, fuck you. Eating is the most basic human thing we do, ffs, and applying a camera before eating isn’t fucking hard. Scam.
I have noticed the same with food delivery services. Low quality AI pictures, mostly wrong.

I'm 90% sure that you and the OP shared screenshots of the same app (Lieferando / Just Eat). The only difference is the app theme and language.

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