You’re not imagining it. That bagel sandwich on the cafe menu looks too symmetrical, too smooth, too… wrong. Generative AI has quietly infiltrated restaurant menus, and the results range from subtly unsettling to outright grotesque — shrimp that appear to eat their own tails, burritos with cheese that looks more like avant-garde sculpture than lunch.
Alex Lisle, CTO at Reality Defender, a startup that builds AI-detection tools, traces the problem to training data. Models like ChatGPT and Midjourney learned what a menu should look like by studying chain restaurant menus from places like Chili’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King. “A lot of this stuff looks like a Chili’s menu from 2015, and there’s a reason for that,” Lisle told TechCrunch. “That was the corpus of work from which [the models] drew their function.”
This creates what researchers call convergence — a less catastrophic cousin of model collapse. When AI trains on its own outputs, it doesn’t always break entirely. Instead, it narrows. Every ice cream scoop becomes perfectly round, every burger patty glistens identically, and the whole thing starts to feel like an alien’s approximation of food. Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, put it bluntly: “The optimization of the data sets is for pleasingness… and so there’s a way that turns into homogenization.”
The problem compounds with every edit. An X user named Labtec generated a menu in ChatGPT, then edited it 100 times to adjust prices and item names. Each revision made the food slightly more round, more smooth, more artificial. TechCrunch replicated the experiment and got the same result. That’s likely what’s happening at real restaurants — small tweaks to a menu file are quietly degrading the images with each pass.
There’s actual science behind the visceral discomfort. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen have studied how people respond to AI-generated food images, and the aversion isn’t just aesthetic snobbery. People can sense when something is off even when they can’t articulate why. For an industry built on making food look appetizing, that’s a genuine business problem — not just an aesthetic one. If customers feel uneasy before they order, the menu has already failed at its only job.
