Something is wrong with the cheese

There’s a burger on my screen that has never existed. It never will.

No cook has ever assembled it, no plate has ever held it, no human smackers have ever attempted to wrap themselves around it. It is perfect in an impossibly perfect way. The way the cheese melts at precisely the right angle…sesame seeds distributed with a regularity that could make a mathematician weep. It is a Platonic ideal of a burger, generated by a computer, and something deep in my brain knows it, even if I can’t immediately tell you why.

Now, before anyone starts: I'm aware food photography has been manipulated to buggery since well before AI. Largely thanks to the OGs: Photoshop, and food stylists.

Food stylists use all sorts of cool tricks: blowtorches for grill marks; glycerine for shine; cardboard stuffed inside baked goods to hold their shape; tampons to steam food on cue (seriously - have a Google). That perfect golden roast chicken is lacquered within an inch of its life and the ice cream that doesn’t melt under studio lighting is, famously, mashed potato. The food industry has been deploying smoke, mirrors, and industrial quantities of hairspray to make their products look edible since the advent of the colour photograph.

However, the food stylist is manipulating something real. There IS a chicken, it just has hairspray on it.

The photoshopped burger, on the other hand, is a statistical average of every burger image that ever existed on the internet, rendered into something that the algorithm deemed sufficiently burger-adjacent. There’s a difference between enhancing reality and inventing it wholesale, and we are now firmly in the second category.

And you can tell! You can always tell. Not immediately, and not always consciously, but something trips the wire.

And the copy. Oh, the copy. As a former English teacher, editor, and copywriter, this is the one that hits me where it hurts. “Experience the perfect blend of flavour and freshness.” “A culinary journey crafted with passion and purpose.” Nobody speaks like that. Nobody has ever spoken like that. It’s a load of crapspackle.

Which brings me to the question: is this false advertising?

The legal definition of false advertising, broadly, is a claim that misleads consumers about the nature of a product. The AI burger that looks nothing like the burger you will actually receive seems to qualify, by most reasonable readings. And yet. The enhanced photography has always got away with it, and nobody legislated the mashed potato ice cream out of existence, so there’s clearly an appetite (sorry) for looking the other way.

But the AI image feels different because it triggers something neurological. It’s the ‘uncanny valley’ of advertising. Applied to food, it works the same way. The burger is close enough to burger, but your gut (again, sorry) knows. You feel vaguely uneasy and you can’t quite place it, and that unease attaches itself to the brand, which is the absolute last thing any advertiser should want.

Will we get better at spotting them? Almost certainly. We got better at spotting Photoshop. We’ll develop an instinct for the too-perfect gleam, the impossible cheese pull, the suspiciously even grill marks. The question is whether that instinct will arrive before or after the regulation does.

On regulation: I wouldn’t hold our collective breath. AI is evolving at the kind of pace that makes legislators look like they’re running through treacle. The tools are moving, the law is not, and in the gap between the two, brands are merrily generating fake food and fake smiles and fake office environments full of fake people who are definitely colleagues and definitely happy and definitely have the correct number of fingers.

There is an argument that it will correct itself. That the uncanny valley effect will force a backlash, and that brands will discover (expensively) that consumers don’t want to be served something that has never existed. That we’ll see a return to the messy, imperfect, REAL food photography of yore. I want my sauce splattered at the wrong angle, and a slightly lopsided bun, thankyouverymuch. An image that says: a person made this, in a real place, and other real people ate it, and here is the evidence.

I genuinely hope so. Because when a company uses AI-generated imagery to advertise its food (or indeed any of its products) it is not just telling us what it looks like, it’s telling us who they are. Yes, it’s free…but at what cost? The cost of consumer trust, is what.

I do want to acknowledge that there is a time and place for AI, lest I be labelled a hypocrite. It genuinely is a time saver when it comes to touching up images, brainstorming, and the likes. Using AI to enhance or assist, rather than create entirely from scratch, is incredibly useful, especially when running a small business. But use with caution. Good advertising should be a form of storytelling, warts and all.

I could go on (you know how I like to). We haven’t even touched on Meta’s auto-generated ad tools (truly the fast food of advertising), plagiarism and cutting jobs from real people, nor the death of creativity at large. Maybe that’s one for another day.

But for now: I don’t want to eat your AI food. I don’t want to work for your company full of people with identical bright smiles and eight fingers. I don’t want to feel uneasy about an advert and not be able to say why.

Just show me the real burger. Even if the cheese has slipped a bit.

Especially if the cheese has slipped a bit.