Generative AI menus have hit the restaurant business courtesy of models trained on a narrow, “pleasing” aesthetic that feels wrong even when you can’t articulate why. “The optimization of the datasets is for pleasingness, or you know, not being offensive, and so there’s a way that turns into homogenization,” Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, told TechCrunch. “What AI is known to do both in images and language is to shave off the edges.”
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/03/the-sameness-problem-behind-those-unappetizing-ai-generated-menus