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The next frontier of food imagery has proven far less appealing than whatever food porn was. From Minneapolis to Hexentanzplatz, restaurants are plastering menus and promotional materials with A.I.-generated renditions of shrimp scampi and quiche, chicken nuggets and burritos, Italian subs and bacon, egg, and cheeses. Anyone with even the mildest case of trypophobia—the sense of revulsion from tiny clusters and holes—should avert their eyes. 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. This may explain the categorical outrage over this latest misuse of generative A.I.: such renderings of food—genuinely, slop—offend the materiality of the living in a way that A.I.’s distortions of words and other inanimate objects somehow do not. These images violate science; they mock life itself. It is Barthes’ conception of ornamental cookery infested with maggots; it is the Food Network, aired from hell.
