Menus Are Getting AI-Sloppified, and the Images Are Terrifying

Chris Murphy said he was on his lunch break from his job as a server at a restaurant in downtown Chicago when he walked to the nearby Chi-Town Deli to buy a sandwich. As he scanned the menu, he noticed something unsettling: All of the images were actually AI-generated monstrosities.

“Immediately I clocked [AI use] from the glossy sheen, the sameness of every sandwich, that weird lettuce that looks like it’s made of bricks, and the horrifying Lovecraftian Reuben sandwich that they were all pictures of AI monstrosities,” Murphy told Business Insider.

I called the Chi-Town Deli and talked to manager Ali Malik. He told me that the AI-generated sign was made by an employee and was put up several weeks ago while they wait for the delivery of a new sign with real photographs. The creepy AI Reubens are a placeholder for now, he said.

So at least in the case of the Chi-Town Deli, the answer to the question, “Why would anyone OK such obviously sloppy AI?” appears to be: “Because it’s only temporary and doesn’t matter that much.”

This does seem to be part of a larger trend — many other restaurants and delis are using AI for menus and signs. And customers seem to hate it.

People have been sharing online photos of very clearly AI-generated food on menus, ranging from humorously uncanny to downright nauseating. At one point, while discussing this story with my editor, I had to close Slack because I couldn’t bear to look at the trytophobia-inducing image of a holey burrito he had sent me a link to.

It’s not hard to guess why a small deli owner might resort to using AI-generated images of their menu instead of paying someone to take photos. These are small business owners in an industry with rising costs and tight margins; your local corner store is unlikely to have much of a marketing budget. Many of the examples people have shared on social media are from cheap eats-type places, not fancy restaurants or big chains.

It’s not like deli photography was so great before AI, either. A lot of delis I’ve been to have used stock images that they clearly didn’t take themselves to show various food offerings. A few years ago, my local deli renovated and put up a massive collage of stock images of foods in the window that defied all logic of cuisine and aesthetics. I didn’t find it particularly appealing, but the outside signage had zero effect on my frequency of visits for snacks and toilet paper (often).

I’m not saying it’s great that these places are using AI to create food monstrosities, but I’m saying I understand. If AI is going to erode society — and maybe it is — deli signage isn’t necessarily what I imagine will be the front lines. Or maybe it is. Like a perfect shrimp doughnut, I keep going in circles on that.