AI is positively everywhere these days. A lot of the time, it feels like you can't escape it - it's just baked into the things you do.
But one place a lot of people probably don't expect to have AI influencing their decisions is food delivery. It's become a pretty big staple in a lot of people's lives, especially post-2020. Having a takeout meal every so often is a nice treat, right?
Well, imagine you open your app to get, let's say, a jacket potato. You go to your favorite local spot, tap on it, and you see... a puffer jacket made of potatoes. And then, the rest of the items look a little strange too.
If you're anything like scores of consumers shopping on the Just Eat app, that isn't just a theoretical - that genuinely happened to them. And, as reported by Dexerto, they really weren't happy.
The AI images came as a kind of test for smaller restaurants in order to make their food look more appealing. The jacket potato wasn't the only crazy "food" item hallucinated by AI.
Others included a "tiger prawn" dish including tiger cubs swimming in sauce, as well as a "red fish" being an entire uncooked red fish lying on paper.
People online weren't too happy to see the whole thing play out. While some people found them "hilarious", others said it made them not want to use the app.
"I want to see what the dish actually looks like as it helps me decide who to order from or what to order," one commenter wrote. "These 'perfect' AI versions just lead to disappointment."
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The Food Delivery App Apologized for the AI Mishap
Following the AI mishaps, Just Eat apologized to consumers.
Per the BBC, they wrote that they were "in the process of removing" the wrong images. They also said they "would stop making more until the AI was further developed."
"We work with tens of thousands of small restaurants on their food imagery, including funding professional local photographers. We've been trialling AI enhanced images, and as with any new technology, it isn't always quite right the first time."
