Why AI food images may never cross the uncanny valley

The backlash continues against AI-generated menu images. Yet, maddeningly, doesn’t it feel like we’re seeing more and more of them? Plus, in my occasional feature One Good Sip (or Bite or Spot), I zero in on a cocktail that I can’t stop drinking in Los Angeles. Because it tells you exactly what you must do with it: Drink it like a fish!

A Philly cheesesteak from Venice’s Mermaid Lagoon by way of the uncanny valley. (Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times) Why is it that we find so much of the AI-generated food imagery in menus and marketing in 2026 so creepy? The word is apt for spooky season and those sorta frightening mac-and-cheese balls I saw a month ago at the Venice Beach walk when I talked to restaurant owners about why they use AI agents for their menus and signage. AI food pictures seem to have a disquieting effect, a weirdness. Something about them is just … off.

A Luddite counterargument is emerging. Scribble me a menu, some are saying, over your AI modeled plate of food. “I would rather see a photo of a sheet of notebook paper messily scrawled with the day’s specials in the chef’s own hand than feel the queasy upset as my eyes and brain try to meet across the uncanny valley of a dish I know cannot be real,” Kat Kinsman wrote recently in Food & Wine.

Unfamiliar with the uncanny valley? You know what it is if you remember the 2004 Tom Hanks film “Polar Express” and the revulsion its CGI-heavy look caused for audiences. The term’s origin is fascinating on its own.

To find it, let’s head back to 1970, which in technology’s terms, is basically the ancient times. That‘s when the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the concept that has become hyper-relevant in our AI age. And certainly as it relates to AI and food.

Daniel Hernandez digs into the stickiest questions around food and culture in Los Angeles and the California borderlands.

In a remarkably prescient essay, Mori used the phrase “bukimi no tani,” or “uncanny valley,” to describe the dissonance that occurs when a robot looks nearly totally human, yet registers in some slight way that it is not. The brain, Mori theorized, really doesn’t like this. (Read the last authorized translation of the essay here.)

If a robot has a clearly un-human form, human affinity for the machine rises, Mori argued. Picture a boxy, cartoonish figure like C3PO in “Star Wars.” Cute, right? But when the humanoid gets to near-perfect human replication yet retains something robotic in its essence, an ickiness takes hold. Picture, say, the T-1000 in “Terminator 2,” played by Robert Patrick, who totally nails it.

Robert Patrick nails it, embodying the uncanny valley in James Cameron’s “Terminator 2.” (TriStar Pictures) Mori died in January 2025. His theory didn’t reach far beyond Japan until the translation of his original essay, first in 1978, then in 2005, and again, with Mori’s approval, in 2012. Ever since, there’s been a boom in research attempting to prove and further map the uncanny valley. The results so far, though, are inconclusive.

Even so, the uncanny valley may be the perfect tool to describe the aversion and “ick” quotient that’s characterizing reactions to the work of AI diffuser models for marketing and menus in the food space. After all, this practice involves selling us stuff we put in our mouths.

While fears that some day soon AI deepfake videos will bridge the uncanny valley for good, it’s safe to say that AI-generated food images are still generally creeping us out. And still pretty easy to spot.

Just look at reactions to our inaugural edition of L.A. Omnivore, as well as a surge in similar posts and reports online (a supportive reader recently joked that the Wall Street Journal “A.I.’ed” or copied our original video on the topic). “AI food photos are like a weird phobia. All the little holes,” one commenter said. Or, as chef Alex Ramirez said, “It triggers my trypophobia.” That is, her fear of patterns or surfaces with lots of holes. And, yikes, I totally agree.

But with so many forces working against restaurants these days, does a little AI hurt us all that much?

Inside Hail Mary Pizza in 2019. Noted: the hand-printed chalk menu. (Lisa Boone / Los Angeles Times) I’ve been asking myself this because despite the backlash, AI food images seem to be proliferating, not disappearing. Hollywood restaurant owner Paul Milan told me last month that his customers appreciate the images and even use them to place orders. The same embrace of AI menus seems to be true for other small food entrepreneurs, many of whom are immigrant, Latino, Black or Asian, with few of the resources of wealthier or more connected business folk. They are using large language models, in effect, to survive.

There’s another factor at play, however, in L.A.

Jeff Barris went from a career in finance to life as a pizza restaurant owner, taking over Hail Mary Pizza in Atwater Village in 2022. Then in May, he joined a growing list of restaurateurs who have faced vociferous backlash against the use of AI imagery in marketing.

The shop’s social media posted an animated AI-generated clip promoting its pizza. The post struck a nerve for the restaurant’s regulars in Atwater and its environs, where Hollywood and creative types tend to live. They are, Barris said, people who are understandably triggered by AI because its use in creative fields is now seen as an existential threat against their own livelihoods.

“It was all animated, not [AI-generated] video,” Barris said, “and it did not go over well.”

Facing a flurry of negative reactions, the AI content was taken down within three hours. By then Hail Mary Pizza had lost a chunk of followers on Instagram. In the aftermath, the pizza spot posted an apology, saying: “We love our customers and support the creative community that makes Los Angeles great. We are sorry for posting AI slop. The truth is we’re just better at pizza. Moving forward we’ll stick to human made content.”

“I live right in the heart of where a lot of the industry lives,” Barris said this week. “So I would not want to come off as not in support of them. And to be honest, that’s exactly how it read after someone pointed it out to me.”

AI may be helping more food business owners streamline the complex and time-consuming back-of-house tasks associated with operating a food establishment. With tariffs, inflation and the ICE raids applying pressure on all sides, the aid of an LLM would make sense. Yet for some, the front-facing aspects of the work, like marketing, are fast becoming a no-go zone for AI usage.

“It was stupid,” Barris of his AI video. “Very, very stupid.”

The Drink Like a Fish at the Mermaid. (Eugene Lee / The Mermaid) I don’t remember the first time walked into the Mermaid bar in Little Tokyo but I do remember thinking, “Oh, this is just right.” On that random night, I nonchalantly ordered the cocktail listed at the top of the menu. Before I knew it, I had had three of them. This week, we’re dissecting a cocktail. And true to the effect it had on me, it’s called Drink Like a Fish.

The Mermaid is a “tropical-themed” and women-owned neighborhood bar in the strip mall east of Central Avenue that’s also home to legacy spot Sushi Gen, the shabu shabu restaurant Tensho and Jun Isogai’s izakaya Kinjiro. The bar has a well-calibrated decorative theme that sits just a touch below kitsch, with a dark interior punctuated by neon underwater-feeling lights and kinda freaky under-the-sea diaramas. (Just don’t call it “tiki,” a term that the owners described as too loaded and limiting.)

Drink Like a Fish mixes two rums, Mount Gay Eclipse from Barbados and Appleton Jamaican rum, with Blue Curacao citrus liqueur, a house cinnamon syrup and Earl Grey tea. It’s poured over ice and garnished with a fish pick and a fresh orchid blossom. Basically, it drinks like an Arnold Palmer.

Co-owners Katie Kildow and Arelene Roldan said the drink came out of the pandemic and their search for a punch-style cocktail that would be relatively easy for staff to make. “Instead of using water for dilution, we thought, let’s use some tea, give people a pick me up,” Kildow said. “We wanted it to have a sea water color and the Earl Grey tea makes it a little murky, which is fun. Like a murky green color.”

Co-owners Katie Kildow and Arelene Roldan of the Mermaid bar in Little Tokyo. (Eugene Lee / The Mermaid) Ugh, the drink is far too successful at what it says it does. There’s none of the aggressive liquor kick or sugar overload often associated with conventional tropical drinks, so you end up taking it in like a seaborne creature indeed. On a recent night, I looked at my tab and prayed for deliverance.

The Drink Like a Fish is suited perfectly to match the smooth locals-only energy at the Mermaid. The bar is queer-friendly without making any effort about it. You’ll never confront a cover, a line at the door or any attitudes. I’ve popped in with close pals around happy hour, before dinner in Little Tokyo, or late on a casual weekend night when it feels like there’s not much else to do. Nothing to do but, ahem, drink like a fish.

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Daniel Hernandez is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he served as Food editor from 2022 to 2026. He is a two-time nominee for a James Beard Media Award and the recipient of the inaugural Nell Minow Award for Cultural Criticism from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.