The strange comfort of AI food slop

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 …