Not the sunrise-tinted sandwich with its eerily symmetrical drippings of melted cheddar. Not the glossy, alien billboard burger or the frothy not-beer a program spit out. And for the love of all that occurs in nature, not the unholy crustacean nightmare ring I encountered in a local ad.
There are so many reasons to reject the generative AI that tech companies and the billionaires that push it in every arena are selling us. But local food businesses, I am begging you, for your own survival and what is left of our appetites, drop AI in the trash like a used pair of food prep gloves.
Some of what feels wrong about AI images, aside from their oft-used zombie apocalypse mud-tinting, is their sameness. The design folks in our production department pointed out to me how text and images in AI ads tend to be of equal weight everywhere, instead of composed with a center, focus and balance in mind. The food is like that, too, but with a creepier sameness that defies natural variation, feels wrong and easily tips over into the grotesque. Bread with perfectly uniform holes isn’t bread anymore. If you see bread like that, don’t touch it and definitely don’t fucking eat it.
Keep in mind that AI’s “learning” and “creating” model is essentially theft of human work. It steals from the images, writing and creativity of people until it starts cannibalizing the content AI has excreted out after digesting that work. This is probably why so much AI food imagery ends up looking like idealized fast food, which, as we all know, never looks like the real thing. It’s a fake of a burger and fries that were catfishing you to begin with. Even when the hand holding it doesn’t have six fingers on each hand, nobody trusts that burger.
Outside of Arcata’s city limits, we seem content to let corporate food chains take over, pulling in money from both local and visiting diners, and sending their cash back to headquarters out of town and out of state. (Local moratoriums on chain operations could cap that effect but we seem to have less appetite for that.) AI ads, menus and posts that blend in with homogenized corporate food only make local restaurants fade further into the background, hiding their individuality and personal touches.
I’d say I’m telling you this because nobody else will, but hon, everyone has been telling you. Look online and see the blowback everywhere. Nobody wants these cursed images. Every time it’s the same: “Hire a local artist/photographer.” And the business owner says they can’t afford it. Many can’t, fair enough. But that doesn’t mean you have to use a technology that’s actively stealing from and destroying the livelihoods of those artists and photographers.
Nobody is watching the cost of food go up more closely than those in the restaurant business, and nobody is more aware of how carefully people are spending their money when dining out — or not. Considerations like the ethics of AI use, whether based on environmental impact or intellectual theft, are part of the calculation in conversations online and in person.
There’s not a single AI version of whatever you’re cooking, from chow mein to gyros, that doesn’t look better photographed with your grill cook’s phone next to the window with a paper plate held up to block the direct glare. That you can afford. And it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be real.
That’s what we love: the little burnt edge stuck to the lasagna tray, the avocado starting to make a break for it sliding out of a BLAT, the uneven crack when the spoon breaks into a crème brûlée. We love crumbly, messy, joy. The best meals of our lives are not perfectly lit. The best chocolate chip cookie you ever ate did not have perfectly spaced chips and even edges.
Feeding one another is such an utterly human act of care. Even stranger to stranger, a takeout bag passed across a counter, it can be a little connection. Recall those days during the peak of the COVID pandemic when that exchange might have been the only one you had in a day, whichever side of the counter you stood on.
To strip the food we make, the labor of our hands, sometimes made from the recipes of our families or our people, of its character and its connection feels like a waste and an insult.
Write your menu on a chalk board. Put it on a napkin in pen. Take a photo of that sandwich on a paper plate and share it. We’re hungry for the real thing.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in Condors of the North Coast.
