Uncanny and unappetizing: appetites spoil as AI images take over food menus
Eating is “such an essential human experience”, said Sennett, a 37-year-old nurse in Denver. “I think it’s a bad cultural thing that restaurants are converting to these horrific, uncanny food images that are unappetizing.”Still, Sennett ordered chicken and macaroni and cheese. It was one of her only lunch options, and she had eaten there before.Increasingly, consumers are encountering AI-generated images of food on restaurant menus or marketing material.
- ▪Eating is “such an essential human experience”, said Sennett, a 37-year-old nurse in Denver.
- ▪“I think it’s a bad cultural thing that restaurants are converting to these horrific, uncanny food images that are unappetizing.”Still, Sennett ordered chicken and macaroni and cheese.
- ▪It was one of her only lunch options, and she had eaten there before.Increasingly, consumers are encountering AI-generated images of food on restaurant menus or marketing material.
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| Original publisher | the Guardian |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/06/ai-food-menu-images |
| Publication time | Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:38:57 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-16T11:53:41.588Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-16T11:53:41.588Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | LhRcNqCnlugs · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Photograph: Lisa BonosView image in fullscreen Photograph: Lisa BonosReworkedAI (artificial intelligence)Uncanny and unappetizing: appetites spoil as AI images take over food menusConsumers are increasingly encountering AI-generated images on food menus such as leathery meat and bread resembling reptile skinSupported byAbout this contentLisa BonosSun 6 Sep 2026 09.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 9 Sep 2026 09.19 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleDuring a recent lunch break, Jill Sennett saw something so unappetizing she had to share it with her 26,000 X followers: Artificial intelligence-generated menu images from a Jamaican barbecue pop-up restaurant in which the meats looked like leather belts crawling with tiny beetles.The images were reshared by more than 500 people who similarly…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at the Guardian.
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