Why AI-generated restaurant food photos keep looking uncanny

Restaurants from Los Angeles night markets to Berlin billboards are filling menus with AI-generated food images that look almost real — and diners say the results often look rubbery, geometric, or viscerally wrong. Researchers and computer-vision specialists argue the reaction is not just bad taste: it tracks an “uncanny valley” for food, technical limits of diffusion models, and cost-cutting in a tight restaurant economy.