Just Eat has paused a trial of AI-generated menu images after the system produced a string of wildly inaccurate food pictures, including a Northern Ireland café’s bacon-and-egg soda bread being rendered as breakfast ingredients floating in a glass of cola. According to reports from the platform, the feature was intended to help restaurants that lacked their own photographs present fuller menus online, but the results quickly became a source of ridicule and confusion.

The idea behind the experiment was straightforward enough: many small independent restaurants cannot afford professional food photography, so an automated stopgap seemed a practical way to fill the gaps. Just Eat said the images were labelled as AI-generated and were manually reviewed before publication, but the examples that circulated online suggested that some prompts were interpreted with alarming literalism. Dishes described as “jacket potato”, “tiger prawn” and “garlic bread plain” reportedly emerged as a coat covered in potatoes, tiger cubs in sauce and an aircraft made of garlic bread.

The Independent reported that other examples included sausage soda bread turned into meat suspended in a fizzy drink, while salt-and-pepper chips were shown as plain potato snacks. The paper said customers reacted with bemusement on social media as the images spread, adding to the sense that the tool had misunderstood not just individual dish names but the wider culinary context in which they were being used.

Just Eat has acknowledged the mistakes, apologised and said it is removing the incorrect images while it continues to develop the product. Resultsense reported that the company has also taken the decision to suspend the trial entirely for now, after customers shared the most glaring failures online. The delivery group is understood to have used the restaurants’ own menu wording as prompts, which may help explain why ambiguous or regional names were sometimes read far too literally.

The episode highlights a broader tension in the rush to deploy generative AI in consumer-facing services: even when the aim is modest, the reputational cost of a mistake can fall on businesses that had little or nothing to do with the error. In this case, that means restaurant owners whose menus were publicly paired with images they did not commission and could not control. Just Eat says the underlying concept remains under review, but any return will need stronger safeguards, better human oversight and a much better grasp of what a soda bread actually is.

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Source: Noah Wire Services