I will use whatever the AI has selected.

In his essay "The Salvation of Beauty", the Korean-Berlin-based philosopher Byung-Chul Han theorised the concept of ‘sleek’ – that is, a society, our own, which loves perfect, frictionless, glossy and polished surfaces. He cited Jeff Koons’s fake glittering balloons as an example, alongside Brazilian waxing and the iPhone. Byung-Chul Han had not yet seen what generative artificial intelligence is capable of, nor what tools such as Grok, Canva and Midjourney can create. We experienced this first-hand with the grotesque AI-generated posters for village festivals this summer, but the real victim—more so than our jobs—is food, or rather the way it is depicted when we go out to eat. A deity of our time – which has transformed city centres into feeding troughs and littered TV channels with sophisticated versions of La Prova del Cuoco or series that turn a sandwich bar into an epic spectacle by making it look like a war room – food is now, like a hollow simulacrum, being redesigned by deep learning and data centres. The result is a move beyond the sleek aesthetic, where everything is pushed to the limits of plausibility and ends up looking not only fake but also repellent. While for nearly two decades we have been discussing ‘food porn’ by photographing weekend meals for Instagram—from smash burgers to tagliatelle with wild boar—today algorithms recreate sandwiches and pasta dishes, giving them a monstrous air, a deformed appearance, like a creature from a John Carpenter film or a third-rate 1990s sci-fi series; the perfect hashtag would be ‘food horror’.

Restaurants—certainly not the Michelin-starred sort—have begun featuring images on their menus, in five languages, of beef fillets, English breakfasts or blueberry muffins created by robots; images that evoke nostalgia for those snapped by a dishwasher with an early-21st-century Olympus digital camera, with the flash reflecting off the butter on the boiled carrots. While the photograph of arrosticini posted on social media for Ferragosto might still have resembled, in a postmodern evolution, a Renaissance still life of game, food created by AI not only appears alien but also loses that one dimension that sets it apart from any other object: appearing as nourishment. As an organic being, can I drool over a slice of apple pie created not by a graphic designer or an illustrator, but by a machine that, by its very nature, does not eat? Of course, even androids often feed themselves, but like Ash from Alien, they ingest synthetic fluids that serve to keep their biomechanical circuits active.

“AI-generated menus,” wrote the editor-in-chief of Food&Wine magazine, “put me off my food”. The journalist has even found herself in high-end restaurants with a certain reputation, scrolling through their online menus only to be confronted with “disturbingly polished images of dishes that don’t look as though they’re made from edible ingredients, and dining rooms lit by an alien sun”. Dear machines, take our jobs away, but don’t dehumanise saffron risotto (and all just to save on a graphic designer). A photograph captured on a Samsung or downloaded from a stock image library would be preferable—or, better yet, the kind found in kebab shops and provincial pubs where the chips have been retouched by a cousin who studied at the IED. Make food imagery affordable once more.