These bagels claim to be Boichik Bagels on the catering website Forkable, but they are fake AI-generated bagels, as perhaps evidenced by the oddly uniform size of the bagel slices, all slightly larger than a normal bagel half. Now restaurants listed on the website are furious.
Below we see an image of Boichik Bagels that were offered on an SF-based catering website called Forkable. Boichik Bagels are celebrated as quite possibly the best in the whole Bay Area, so it’s not like this brand needs any embellishment. But very oddly, these bagels have the bottom fourth of the bagel cut away and discarded, in a way that I doubt that any human being has ever eaten a bagel, ever. Moreover, one of the shmears is labeled as “Pink Label,” which is an existing Boichik product, but one that looks nothing like what is depicted below.
That’s because what is depicted above is a completely fake AI-generated image. Eater SF has an excellent investigative report on the website Forkable cramming restaurants’ listings with fake AI pictures on their platform, without those restaurants’ permission. Forkable describes itself as providing “catering for any event, powered with AI-tools,” but the actual restaurateurs are none too happy to see their well-prepared cuisine presented as AI slop.
“If you’re ordering off a menu, you want it to look like the actual food — it just doesn’t look right,” Boichik Bagels owner Emily Winston told Eater SF. “It looks like you’re ordering fake, fake food.”
Eater SF confirmed that restaurants listed on Forkable received a November 17 email telling them that the replacement AI images were coming, in Forkable’s words, “to improve image quality and consistency.” The email added that restaurants were free to swap out the replacement images and add real images of their actual food to the listings, but they would have to do this manually themselves.
“I feel like they absolutely could have offered it as a service and you can opt in,” Winston added to Eater SF. “But I’m not happy that they just went and did it on their own.”
Forkable co-founder and president Nick Naczinski admitted some wrongdoing, but seemed remorseless, and of course couldn’t help himself from hyping his company with investorspeak.
“Honestly, given how central Forkable is to office lunch, corporate events, and catering, we moved too quickly,” he said in a statement to Eater SF. “We’ve heard the feedback, and we’re returning to traditional photography. We still believe limited use of AI-enhanced imagery can improve the experience for customers and restaurants as we expand globally, and we’re committed to getting the balance right.”
It seems a foregone conclusion that most restaurant consumers do not want misleading fake images providing false advertising of the food they are about to order. So the company may see some reputational damage locally in the short term.
But if the “AI-powered” Grubhub copycat Forkable wants to "expand globally,” maybe blatantly false images of AI-imagined food are a shrewd way to do this. After all, VCs and investors love anything AI these days, probably including food photos, and those investors may have just gained a special new level of respect for Forkable’s bait-and-switch photo program.
Related: Asinine Website Ranks SF Restaurant Patrons By Hotness, Using AI [SFist]
Image via Forkable
