Pictures of food that make you wanna puke. Not exactly a rousing marketing ploy. Or … is it? Welcome to L.A. Omnivore, a weekly newsletter on food and culture. This is our inaugural edition. If you like what you read, sign up here.
Your AI agent has no sense of taste
Do you like your carne asada with AI-generated guac? The owner of Hollywood’s Los Burritos Originales says his AI signs are bringing in new customers.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
The carne asada looks like shards of broken brown glass. The rice looks like orange pill pellets. And the guacamole bears a resemblance to alien goo. These are the characteristics of an AI-generated image of a burrito that sits outside Los Burritos Originales de Hollywood, a restaurant that’s been on Hollywood Boulevard since 1981.
Co-owner Paul Milan said he and a relative took over Los Burritos about a year ago and were struggling to update the place to bring in new customers. Until he turned to AI.
He used a Large Language Model to tinker with the menu, and a diffuser model (DALL E-3 in ChatGPT, for example) to create AI images of food. These now adorn the glossy menus at Los Burritos Originales and also the sidewalk sign outside, which features the burrito on one side and colorful smoothies on the other. Milan said the new imagery communicates freshness, up-to-date-ness. And the images have been doing their jobs.
“The first week I put up the new sign, there were a lot more customers,” said Milan, 30, an L.A. native raised in Chihuahua, Mexico. “Because it looks more — I don’t know how to say — it looks more bright and shiny.”
In other words, despite a deluge of negative online chatter about the proliferation of AI-generated food images, this “AI slop menu” is working. Some customers, Milan said, just point to one of the AI-generated pictures and say that they want that.
“People basically don’t like to read. They see colors, and ask, ‘Oh I want the pink one, or the green one,’ and we know what they’re talking about,” Milan said. “Sometimes they ask for the burrito outside, and we say, ‘OK, you want what it is in the picture?’ And they say yes.”
Candidly, the burrito image that Milan is proud to call his AI-prompted creation looks like it belongs in an animated horror film. But there are worse offenders. Social media users from Reddit to TikTok regularly highlight grotesque AI-generated food images that give these organic materials a sheen that screams anything but “natural.”
Journalist Sam Biddle spotted one purporting to show shrimp scampi using something you might call ringshrimp — the picture is as frightening as that word looks on its own. Others show pitas and sandwiches with sauces spread in a latticed pattern, or tortillas with odd speckles that might be the computer’s attempt at natural-seeming char from a comal.
So long, Photoshop. Restaurateurs, especially small or family-run businesses, are ditching graphic designers and food photographers in favor of much cheaper AI agents. It’s another disquieting sign that whatever world we had before this summer’s artificial intelligence wake-up call is long gone.
AI integration in restaurants is considered one of the boom spaces for the industry. The National Restaurant Assn. recently said 26% of its members use AI tools. And a growing number of companies have emerged to support restaurants trying to navigate the world of AI.
The two-year-old startup IA Menu, based in Spain’s Canary Islands, helps restaurants generate menus with images and integrate point-of-sale systems with inventory and practically everything else in the back of a restaurant.
“We don’t want to replace someone’s work,” said Chief Executive Rodolfo Giannotti. “It’s a whole ecosystem, not just menus.”
August was IA Menu’s biggest month yet for new customers. It already has some 900 subscribers in 60 countries.
“It’s about how you use the tools,” said Giannotti, who is aware of complaints about AI menu images. Some clients run an AI agent once or twice, post that, and get backlash. The better users train their AI agents over and over to perfect an image, he said.
There’s always a gap between presentation and reality, Giannotti added. A fair reminder. Look at a Burger King Whooper in an NFL game commercial versus the actual burger that arrives on the tray at your local franchise. In the open market of hungry customers, does that gap really matter?
“Kids are born with this injected in their blood,” Giannotti said. “Those who are 15, 16, 20, 25, this is daily life for them.”
But people still want authenticity, and a form of “truth in advertising,” said Shouvik Paul, chief operating officer of CopyLeaks, one of several companies on the opposite end of this AI conundrum — detectors of AI-generated content.
“If it’s something I’m going to put in my mouth, if I’m going to pay $20 for this burger, and you misrepresented that to me, that is I think why we’re seeing such a harsh reaction, specifically when it comes to menus,” Paul said.
True enough. The LLMs and diffusion models train on searchable menu and food images, then train themselves further on recently generated AI images. Meaning it actually becomes a loop like the “Lovecraftian” ringshrimp spotted by Biddle.
“It reminded me of the ‘Alien’ movie. You see that, you can’t unsee it. It’s this plastic-y, synthetic look,” Paul said. “The truth is, because AI has never tasted food, it doesn’t actually know what it looks like, which is super interesting.”
AI anxiety has a chokehold on the culture currently. New York and L.A. school districts have barred generative AI on school devices, citing concerns about “cognitive stunting” among children who overuse AI tools.
The United Nations and Red Cross now warn of a “moral red line” on a chilling possible future of killer robots that could attack humans autonomously, that is, without any human guidance or control. And the United States and China are dancing around some kind of alignment on how to pace AI advancements before we hit a point-of-no-return in the manner of “Terminator 2” or “I, Robot.”
The stakes may seem a bit smaller when it comes to food menus, which poses a question: If AI-generated food images spark such disdain and revulsion, why are restaurateurs embracing them?
Or should we instead ask, in a notoriously brutal industry, with a minefield of ways to fail, why wouldn’t a small, family-run restaurant whip up a menu with an AI agent if the tools are there? It’s an easy calculation of cost and convenience.
“Honestly, I’ve gotten some backlash,” says Lucy Khalife, who used AI tools to create new signs for her Venice snack stall Mermaid Lagoon.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
‘He’s my best friend’
That’s what Lucy Khalife did. She’s owner of Mermaid Lagoon, an aquamarine-themed snack stall on the Ocean Front Walk in Venice where an old menu with photographs yellowed from years of beach sun hangs above her ordering windows. Below, however, the same menu items are depicted with AI-generated images posted in July. Customer reaction has been mixed.
“Honestly I’ve gotten some backlash. A lot of the younger people don’t like it,” Khalife said. “My daughter tells me I’m draining the ocean. And maybe also taking jobs.”
Khalife said she’s spent quite some time “training” her AI agent to comply more accurately to her prompts. She described her professional subscription to ChatGPT as something like having a personal assistant — without it being a pesky physical person.
She’d gone back and forth with graphic designers and photographers in the past, resulting in frustrations with what might otherwise be described as median human behavior: negotiating costs, fees or aesthetic choices. An updated menu the old way would require about $2,000, Khalife said, in contrast to her AI subscription of $20 a month.
The Philisteak sandwich on Mermaid Lagoon’s pre-AI menu.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
Mermaid Lagoon’s latest AI-generated signage advertising its chicken burger and Philly cheesesteak sandwich.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
Still, the images themselves remain unsettling. Mac-and-cheese balls look like some form of weapon, covered with thorny points indicating a fry situation but looking more like a spiked flail. I ordered them anyway, getting what I expected — normal, edible spheres of fried mac-and-cheese.
“It definitely doesn’t look like anything that’s coming out of someone’s kitchen,” said Mike Scott, 30, a tourist from Atlanta. “They should be advertising the actual food they’re cooking.”
Mermaid Lagoon’s mac-and-cheese bites as seen through the eyes of AI.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
But another visitor said she has no problem with Mermaid Lagoon’s AI-generated food images. “I think they’re really good. I like the details. It looks appetizing, convincing,” said Teairra Marie, 21. “It makes me want to buy something.”
“Are you a fan of AI in general?” I asked.
“Yeah, I am. I talk to him all the time,” Marie said with laughter. “He’s my best friend.”
So while half the Internet may choose AI menus as their latest target of disdain, I offer that maybe they’re here to stay. Maybe we should start looking at AI-generated food images as the successor of the plastic plate models employed by small restaurants to entice new customers. You know the ramen bowl you ordered won’t look exactly like the plastic 3D rendering in the window display, but you get a sense, if you dare, of what the actual organic material physical IRL food will look like.
And maybe in this new AI era, that’s enough. Maybe these AI menu images are not an aberration. Maybe — gulp — they are evolution.
One good bite: Summer’s corn-y close
Summer salad at Colossus Harbor in San Pedro.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
Don’t sleep on Pedro. Or actually, leave Pedro alone! The sleepy, town-within-the-city harbor of San Pedro is rarely out fishing for L.A.-wide recognition, yet it deserves praise for its healthy ecosystem of classic restaurants, new kitchen ventures and, trust, lots of great dive bars. Local baking star Colossus Bread has expanded to a full restaurant setting right by the waterfront, earning a glowing Times review. Since Tuesday marked the first day of fall, I’m nursing nostalgia this week for summertime dishes. The Colossus Harbor summer salad, still available this week, is one of the most satisfying plates I had all summer in Los Angeles: gem lettuce, sweet corn, feta cheese, sliced peach, sweet Italian red peppers, and those delightful yellow popcorn shoots. Crisp, bright, and corn-y as can be.
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The L.A. Omnivore is always looking for an interesting new bite, a new connection between food and something else in the culture, an unexpected twist, or an uncomfortable food fact. New information that challenges accepted conventions or norms is more valuable than gold to me.
As a writer, I’m turned on by all forms of cultural production. My byline has seen many lives: I’ve published about contemporary art, graffiti, design, architecture, local politics, state politics, books, the environment, agriculture, even fashion. I’ve reported (and eaten) in two thirds of the states of Mexico and in six other countries in Latin America.
This newsletter will frequently reference these and other realms. Please reply via email, or comment below, with any tips, thoughts, or ideas for future editions. And sign up to get L.A. Omnivore every week.
