New Yorker: 'The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop' on Menus
TL;DR
- Brady Brickner-Wood's New Yorker essay asks why generative-AI food imagery on restaurant and café menus feels uniquely unsettling.
- He walks from Victorian still-lifes of lizards on fruit and dead game birds to nineteen-thirties color-print advertising to today's generative approximations.
- His verdict: computer-generated dishes on menus 'inspire neither gluttony nor lust,' failing the emotional job food photography has always done.
Brady Brickner-Wood's latest New Yorker essay, passed around by a couple of writers on our Who's Who list, turns on one aesthetic question: why does generative-AI food imagery on café and restaurant menus feel so wrong?
He traces the medium back centuries. In the mid-eighteen-hundreds, he writes, "the Victorians shot still-life arrangements of lizards crawling over fruit and dead game birds hanging from a nail." A shift came, he notes, in the nineteen-thirties, when "the introduction of color printing to advertising changed how food was shot on camera, and thus conceived of culturally."
His verdict on today's synthetic plates is flat: "Restaurants choosing to showcase computer-generated approximations of the dishes they serve inspire neither gluttony nor lust."
Shared on Bluesky by 2 AI experts
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«A nauseating, nightmarish quality defines A.I.’s insectified interpretation of human cuisine, as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon. …These images violate science; they mock life its…
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Originally reported by newyorker.com
Read the original article →Original headline: The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop