Restaurants and food delivery apps profit from AI-generated images; the loser in the situation is the hungry customer [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
The use of AI-generated food images has made it challenging for customers to tell apart realistic food items from dishes that exist only in the cook’s dreams. A regular customer knows the disappointment of opening their takeaway box to find a meal that looks nowhere near as good as it did in the thumbnail image on their app.A quick exploration of the Swiggy app revealed a number of restaurants using AI-generated images of food items including noodles, pizza, pulao, and more.While there are some obvious signs of AI use — such as unnaturally flowing cheese, strange food textures, uniformly patterned vegetables, or artificially bright colours — other images can look real until the user enlarges the photo to see a faint AI disclaimer.Swiggy’s own disclaimer page for restaurants that use AI-generated images notes that “dish details might be AI-crafted for a better experience.” However, the AI label is easy for hurried users to miss.
A small AI image disclaimer on Swiggy is easy to miss when the customer does not enlarge the image
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