When looking for a recipe, you probably often turn to the internet for help. While recipe collections, cookbooks, cookie recipes exchanged between colleagues and family recipe booklets used to go hand in hand, the way we approach cooking and even restaurant shopping has changed completely. And not necessarily in the right direction.
There’s a restaurant, or rather a restaurant’s Instagram page, described as being located in Austin, with thousands of followers, and the food posted, like the little hippo-shaped pastry or the foot-shaped pizza, is circulating the internet. And what’s interesting about that? That this restaurant does not exist in reality. And the images are created by artificial intelligence.
Our relationship with food has changed
If we were to travel back in time twenty or thirty years and tell a young person that in a few years’ time, what will matter is not whether the food tastes good, but whether it looks good. Or that you won’t care if it gets cold, you won’t eat it until you take a photo of it, and then either show it to your friends or never look at it again, he’d probably say we’re crazy. But social media has fundamentally changed what and where we eat.
In today’s restaurants, it is not just a matter of the food being delicious, the flavours being good, but also, and in many cases more importantly, the décor, the lighting and the presentation of the food, even in colour. The photos of the aforementioned non-existent restaurant Ethos are liked by bots, and also by a great many flesh and blood people who do not realise that the photos were taken by artificial intelligence. What this is all for, apart from testing what the image generation is good for and producing some funny pictures of, for example, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world and founder of Amazon, serving cocktails, is, for example, making money. Because you can also buy T-shirts.
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