I just want to see the actual food

Fast food chains have been lying to us with photos for decades. On the menu board, the burger looks like it’s trained for this moment its whole life: tall and proud, lettuce like a fresh salad, cheese draped like a silk scarf. Then you open the box and it looks like it’s been through a breakup. Flat and sad, the bun clinging to one corner of the patty for emotional support.

We made peace with that years ago. It’s practically tradition.

But now my local restaurants are at it too, and they’ve brought AI along for the ride.

I’m spotting it everywhere: menus, delivery apps, that lovely family-run place’s Instagram. The dishes look too good. Steam curls like it’s auditioning for a perfume advert. Sauce glistens like it’s been varnished. And the same plate of pasta looks completely different in every photo, because no actual pasta was ever harmed in the making of these images.

At least the fast food burger was a real burger. Someone cooked it, sprayed it with something questionable and photographed it under studio lights. It was a lie, but an honest lie. An AI dish is pure fan fiction. The restaurant isn’t showing me their food. It’s showing me what a computer imagines their food might look like after reading a lot of menus.

And it costs them trust. If your carbonara photo is fake, why would I believe “homemade”, “locally sourced” or “Nonna’s secret recipe”? For all I know, Nonna is also AI-generated.

How to spot AI food photos

• Too-perfect steam. Real steam is faint and messy. AI steam rises in neat, dramatic swirls like a ghost doing a dance routine.
• Glossy everything. Every surface shines the same, from the sauce and the bread to the lettuce. Real food has textures. Not everything looks freshly waxed.
• Suspiciously perfect char. Grill marks that are perfectly even, every chip golden to the exact same shade, and pizza crust browned like it came out of a paint tin. Real cooking has burnt bits and pale bits.
• Too much of everything. Toppings piled impossibly high, with no gaps, overlaps or sliding. Real burgers lean. Real pizzas have a bare patch where the pepperoni ran out.

None of these is proof on its own, but when several show up in the same picture, there’s a good chance no chef was involved.

A plea to restaurants

As someone who builds things for the web, I get the temptation. Good food photography takes time, light and skill, and AI does it in seconds. But your website and your menu exist for one reason: to make me trust you enough to come in and eat.

A slightly wonky phone photo of your real dish, taken by the window at lunchtime, does that job far better than a flawless fake. I’d rather see an honest plate with a smudge of sauce on the rim than a perfect one that doesn’t exist.

Show me the actual food. If it tastes good, that’s enough. And if it doesn’t, a fake photo won’t save you. It just means I’ll be extra disappointed.

Do you trust food photos online any more? Tell me in the comments.