Business
AI-Generated Food Images Spoil Appetites As Restaurants Turn To ChatGPT For Menu Photos
Consumers across the country are increasingly encountering artificial intelligence-generated images of food on restaurant menus and marketing materials, and many say the results are unappetizing, misleading and sparking a wave of online backlash against the growing trend.
The controversy gained fresh attention after Jill Sennett, a 37-year-old nurse in Denver, shared AI-generated menu images from a Jamaican barbecue pop-up restaurant with her 26,000 followers on X, showing meats that appeared to resemble leather belts covered in tiny beetles. The post was reshared by more than 500 people, many of whom expressed similar disgust at the images.
Sennett said the trend feels like a troubling shift in how restaurants present food to customers.
“Such an essential human experience,” Sennett said of eating, adding that she views the shift toward AI-generated food imagery as “a bad cultural thing that restaurants are converting to these horrific, uncanny food images that are unappetizing.”
Despite her reaction to the images, Sennett said she still ordered chicken and macaroni and cheese from the restaurant, noting it was one of her only lunch options at the time and that she had eaten there previously.
The manager of Jamaican Jerk and Barbecue Restaurant, the Denver establishment that hosted the pop-up at Sennett’s hospital, confirmed he had used ChatGPT to generate the menu images rather than paying a graphic designer, a service he does use for the restaurant’s permanent, bricks-and-mortar location.
“We decided we would design something that was eye-catching,” the manager said, declining to give his name for publication. “Restaurant people are trying to be cost-effective.”
According to a 2026 report from the National Restaurant Association, 26% of restaurant operators now use AI in some capacity to assist with marketing, inventory management, employee scheduling, menu optimization or order taking, reflecting the technology’s growing footprint across the industry even as consumer reactions to specific applications, particularly AI-generated food imagery, have proven mixed at best.
Backlash to the trend has been particularly sharp in the San Francisco Bay Area, a hub for AI development. When San Francisco cafe Grind & Unwind put up signage depicting menu items that locals quickly identified as AI-generated, vandals graffitied the storefront with a message cafe owner Lyndsey Lozano interpreted as reading “seriously.” A Reddit post titled “Yum, slop” drew commenters comparing the AI-generated bread images to textures resembling reptile skin and a loofah.
Lozano told SFGate in July that the reaction was “not what we were expecting,” noting the signage had only been intended as a temporary measure. She and her husband subsequently removed the AI-generated signage and spent an estimated $700 painting over the resulting graffiti, according to SFGate.
Sennett said she finds some amusement in AI’s continued struggles to convincingly render food.
“It can do uncanny videos of celebrities, but it can’t depict a hamburger,” Sennett said. “I hope it stays that way, honestly, and we can shame restaurants into stopping.”
Industry professionals say the technology’s growing use reflects genuine cost pressures facing restaurants, even as its application to customer-facing imagery specifically remains contentious. Hunter Lewis, editor in chief of Food and Wine magazine, said he has observed restaurants increasingly automating parts of their back-end operations, but cautioned that AI’s use should generally remain invisible to diners.
“The American dining public is smart,” Lewis said. “They know what they want, and they know what is real.”
Some restaurants have leaned into rejecting the technology entirely as a marketing strategy of its own. When Wyoming restaurant Chugwater Soda Fountain publicly pledged, on a piece of cardboard, that it would never use AI and would instead continue posting hand-drawn images of its burgers, the Instagram post drew more than 200,000 likes, with some commenters celebrating the homespun approach while others noted the irony of posting the pledge on an AI-powered social media platform.
Jamie Soja, a professional photographer in the Bay Area who has shot images for restaurant marketing and food-delivery services, said AI-generated images most often fail to accurately capture a dish’s texture.
“The color and texture and the ingredients look kind of off in the way that they’re arranged,” Soja said, adding that lighting in AI-generated food images frequently appears unnatural as well.
Major technology platforms are increasingly embedding AI tools directly into their systems, further complicating the debate. Food-delivery app DoorDash offers AI photo tools designed “to improve the presentation of an existing image of a dish,” adjusting lighting, color or background, the company said in a statement. DoorDash said its policies prohibit restaurants from creating or altering misleading images of menu items, and that the company reviews menu images for compliance, automatically applying an “AI-enhanced” label to images edited using its tool. Even so, distinguishing AI-generated images from simply heavily edited photography can prove difficult even for trained professionals like Soja.
Researchers have begun studying how AI-generated food imagery affects consumer perception and appetite. In a 2024 study, Charles Spence, a University of Oxford professor of experimental psychology, found that consumers generally preferred AI-generated food images when they did not know the images had been created by a machine, but rated the same images as less appealing once that fact was disclosed to them. Spence’s research also found that AI tools tend to alter food images in predictable ways, often adding visual cues of fat, such as butter on mashed potatoes, when prompted to make an image appear more appealing, raising concerns that such imagery could subtly nudge both diners and chefs toward larger portions with higher fat content over time.
The backlash has extended even to professionals who work with AI regularly. Brandon Hill, chief executive of a design and marketing agency in San Francisco, said he was sufficiently put off by AI-generated menu images at a downtown cafe that he photographed and shared them with his more than 86,000 followers on X, noting that even in a city known for AI development, the resulting images “don’t look all that appetizing.” Hill said the images also left him “skeptical of what the actual meals will look like.”
Not every restaurant owner has faced the same backlash. Nila Norero Salvatore, owner of Bella Cafe, the San Francisco cafe referenced in Hill’s post, said she has not personally received complaints about the ChatGPT-designed signage advertising her breakfast menu. Norero Salvatore, 65, described herself and her husband as “old-fashioned,” adding that experimenting with AI has felt “fun” and “new for us.” She said she also uses ChatGPT to help write employee reference letters and draft the cafe’s staff handbook.
Beyond the cost savings on graphic design, Norero Salvatore said she genuinely likes how the AI-generated images look.
“I think it’s a great way of advertising our products, even though sometimes people say AI isn’t effective or it’s not natural,” she said.
As restaurants continue navigating the still-developing norms around AI-generated imagery in customer-facing marketing, the sharply divided reactions from diners, industry professionals and restaurant owners alike suggest the debate over the technology’s place on menus is likely to persist even as more establishments experiment with the cost-saving tools.
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YouTube Down? Users Report Access Issues Sunday Morning As Reports Spike On Downdetector Worldwide Today
YouTube users began reporting access problems early Sunday morning, with outage-tracking services logging a surge in complaints, marking the latest in a series of intermittent disruptions to affect the video platform over the past several days.
According to outage-tracking reports, the volume of user complaints on Downdetector’s UK tracker surged starting around 5:07 a.m. BST, which corresponds to 12:07 a.m. Eastern time, with users reporting trouble accessing the platform across both the website and mobile app.
Independent monitoring service StatusGator recorded 253 user-submitted outage reports over the preceding 24-hour period as of early Sunday, while overall characterizing YouTube as currently operational. Top reported outage locations over that window included Texas, California and Illinois in the United States, according to the service’s tracking data.
Sunday’s reports add to a pattern of recurring, shorter disruptions that have affected YouTube throughout the past week. StatusGator’s incident log shows a separate outage lasting 2 hours and 9 minutes detected on Sept. 3 at 9:23 p.m., in which users reported YouTube failing to load or connect, along with an earlier incident detected Sept. 2 at 12:21 a.m. that lasted 6 hours and 32 minutes, involving similar connectivity and loading problems. Neither of those prior incidents was officially acknowledged by YouTube at the time they were logged, according to StatusGator’s records.
The recurring smaller disruptions this week follow a considerably larger, global YouTube outage that struck the platform in February 2026. That earlier incident began around 7:50 p.m. ET on Feb. 17, with a massive spike in reports on Downdetector showing more than 280,000 complaints in the United States alone and more than 30,000 in the United Kingdom. YouTube TV was also affected during that outage, with more than 8,000 additional reports logged for that separate streaming service, making it one of the more significant Google-related outages recorded in recent memory.
During the February incident, YouTube’s official TeamYouTube account on X acknowledged the disruption directly.
“If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this and will follow up here with updates,” the TeamYouTube account posted at the time.
Google later confirmed the specific technical cause behind that February outage in a statement posted to YouTube’s official help page.
“We’re aware some of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now. Our teams are aware, and we’ll provide updates as soon as we have them,” the statement read, before the company later attributed the disruption specifically to an issue with YouTube’s recommendation system, which had prevented videos from appearing across various parts of the platform, including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids.
According to Variety’s coverage of that February incident, users were still able to access videos directly through their existing subscriptions during the disruption, even as the homepage and the suggestion bar within the video player displayed as completely blank across both the mobile app and desktop versions of the site. TeamYouTube later confirmed on X that the homepage had been restored, though the recommendation and suggestion features took additional time to fully return to normal function.
That February 2026 disruption itself echoed an earlier, comparably large YouTube outage recorded in 2018, when the platform went down for an extended period beginning around 6:15 p.m. Pacific time, drawing widespread attention at the time given how rarely YouTube experiences significant downtime relative to its massive daily user base.
YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, remains one of the most heavily trafficked websites in the world, serving billions of users who watch and upload video content across virtually every category imaginable. Given that scale, even relatively brief or localized disruptions tend to generate significant public attention and social media discussion, as users quickly turn to platforms like X to check whether an issue they are experiencing reflects a broader outage or is instead isolated to their own device or internet connection.
Outage-tracking platforms including Downdetector and StatusGator compile crowdsourced reports from affected users, comparing the volume of incoming complaints against typical background activity levels to help determine whether a genuine, widespread service disruption is underway. A sudden, sharp spike in reports across a large number of users and locations, as occurred early Sunday, is generally treated as a reasonably strong signal of an emerging platform-level issue, though the underlying cause and full scope of any given disruption can vary significantly from incident to incident.
As of Sunday morning, it remained unclear whether YouTube had issued any official acknowledgment of the reported access issues, or what, if any, technical cause might be responsible for the latest spike in complaints. Given the pattern of intermittent, unacknowledged outages recorded over the preceding days according to StatusGator’s tracking, it also remained uncertain whether Sunday’s reports represented a continuation of that same underlying issue or a separate, unrelated disruption.
Affected users experiencing trouble accessing YouTube were advised to check both Downdetector’s live outage tracker and YouTube’s official help page and support channels for the most current information, while independent monitoring services continued tracking the platform’s real-time availability across different regions and device types in the absence of a detailed public statement from Google addressing the specific cause of Sunday’s reported disruption.
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Business
AEW Star Andy ‘The Butcher’ Williams Dies At 48 After Collapsing During Match In Pennsylvania
MILLVALE, Pa. — Andy Williams, the professional wrestler known to All Elite Wrestling fans as “The Butcher” and a founding guitarist of the metalcore band Every Time I Die, has died at age 48 after collapsing during a match at an independent wrestling event in Pennsylvania on Saturday night.
The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed Williams’ death to TMZ, which was the first outlet to report the news early Sunday morning. Williams had been competing in a tag team match against TME alongside his longtime partner, The Blade, real name Jesse Guilmette, during Enjoy Wrestling’s Five-Year Anniversary show at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale.
According to an eyewitness account provided to POST Wrestling, Williams appeared to be struggling physically toward the end of the match.
“It was towards the end of the match,” eyewitness Rich Fann said. “He seemed to be in a bit of dire straits, they went to a finish, and he was a little wobbly. Andy then went down, and Blade helped him up a bit and then tried to get folks to help. Once they saw, both the crew, the paramedics, and the crowd worked in unison.”
According to wrestling news outlet Fightful, Williams’ legs buckled before he fell to the floor. The Blade attempted to help him back up, but Williams collapsed a second time and lost consciousness. Ringside paramedics performed chest compressions and used a defibrillator on Williams before he was loaded into an ambulance and transported to Allegheny General Hospital.
Enjoy Wrestling immediately canceled the remainder of the event following the incident and released a statement on social media confirming what had happened.
“Andy collapsed at the end of his match this evening,” the promotion wrote. “Our doctors on staff tended to him immediately, administering CPR until the ambulance arrived. We sent everyone home and are at the hospital now waiting for more information.”
The promotion later posted a brief follow-up message thanking those who had assisted at the scene and reached out with support in the hours following the incident.
News of Williams’ death was initially met with confusion online. A wrestling podcaster had reported hours earlier that Williams had died at the hospital, prompting Enjoy Wrestling to respond directly to a social media post repeating that claim, writing, “It’s not true. Delete this.” That response was subsequently deleted by the promotion without further explanation, adding to the uncertainty surrounding Williams’ condition until the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed his death to TMZ on Sunday morning, resolving the conflicting reports. No cause of death has been released, with an official investigation and autopsy pending.
Williams, a Buffalo, New York native, built a distinctive dual career spanning both professional wrestling and heavy music. He was a founding guitarist of Every Time I Die, an influential metalcore band formed in 1998 that became a significant act within the genre before disbanding in 2022 after more than two decades together. Williams continued making music following the band’s breakup, most recently performing with his newer metalcore project, Atomic Rule.
Williams’ wrestling career gained momentum after he trained under mixed martial artist and wrestler Josh Barnett. He formed the tag team known as The Butcher and The Blade alongside Guilmette, and the pair eventually brought their act to All Elite Wrestling in 2019, becoming one of the promotion’s recognizable tag team acts over the years that followed. Williams spent the better part of the last seven years competing as one half of that duo within AEW.
Tributes to Williams poured in from across both the wrestling and music communities following confirmation of his death. Musician Andy H. Murray offered a heartfelt remembrance on social media.
“Andy Williams, rest in peace,” Murray wrote. “With ETID (and later Atomic Rule), he blazed musical trails, redefined heavy music, and influenced a generation. As The Butcher, he was an awesome throwback brawler. He was a great man with a beautiful soul. I am so sorry for those closest to him.”
Wrestling fan and commentator Mark, who posts under the handle WrestleMobs, similarly reflected on Williams’ impact across both of his creative pursuits.
“I adored The Butcher throughout AEW’s formative years,” the tribute read. “Huge condolences and prayers to his family, friends, colleagues and fans worldwide mourning the loss of an incredible multi talented musician, wrestler, performer and man. Rest in Peace, Andy Williams.”
Notably, Williams and The Blade had held a wrestling seminar through Enjoy Wrestling the night before the fatal incident, as part of the promotion’s broader Five-Year Anniversary weekend of events. Williams and Guilmette had been challenging TME for the tag team championship at the time of the medical emergency, a title match that ultimately went unfinished following the cancellation of the remainder of the card.
As of Sunday, no statement had been made public from Williams’ immediate family, and additional details regarding funeral or memorial arrangements had not yet been announced. Wrestling promotions and outlets covering the sport, including publications that had closely followed Williams’ AEW career, extended condolences to his family, friends and colleagues in the wake of the confirmed death.
Williams’ unique path, building parallel careers as both a touring heavy metal musician and a professional wrestler over more than two decades, had earned him a devoted following across both communities, with fans and fellow performers alike remembering him Sunday as a distinctive and beloved figure within both worlds. Investigators with the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office are expected to conduct a full autopsy to determine the specific cause of Williams’ death, with additional information likely to follow in the coming days as the investigation continues.
Business
Brand New Day’ Crosses $900 Million, Nears All-Time Domestic Box Office Record This Labor Day
LOS ANGELES — “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” crossed $900 million at the domestic box office Friday, becoming only the second film in cinema history to reach that milestone and positioning the Sony and Marvel blockbuster to overtake “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” as the highest-grossing domestic release of all time in the coming days.
The Tom Holland-led film reached the $900 million threshold in just 36 days, according to Deadline, shattering the previous record for fastest film to hit that mark, which had been set by “The Force Awakens” in 50 days following its 2015 release. The only prior film to ever cross $900 million domestically, “The Force Awakens” finished its theatrical run with $936.6 million, a figure that has stood as the unadjusted all-time North American box office record for more than a decade.
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, “Brand New Day” was on track to spend its sixth consecutive weekend atop the domestic box office over the four-day Labor Day holiday period, with projections estimating the film would earn roughly $22 million over the extended weekend. According to Deadline’s estimates, that would push the film’s cumulative domestic total to approximately $921 million by the close of business Monday, leaving it just $15 million to $16 million short of overtaking “The Force Awakens’” all-time record.
The film’s remarkable staying power has come during what is typically a quieter stretch of the summer movie calendar. New wide releases including “By Any Means” and A24’s “Onslaught” were not expected to seriously challenge “Brand New Day’s” hold on the top spot at the box office, according to industry tracking.
Tom Holland could occupy both of the top two positions at the domestic box office this Labor Day weekend. Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” which also stars Holland, was projected to finish in second place with approximately $16.4 million over the extended weekend, according to reporting on the weekend’s box office estimates. The Universal epic, now in its eighth weekend in theaters, was expected to reach roughly $588.1 million domestically by Monday.
“Brand New Day’s” success has extended well beyond North America. The film has earned more than $2.33 billion worldwide, placing it third on the all-time global box office chart, trailing only James Cameron’s “Avatar” and Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame.” The film recently surpassed “Avatar: The Way of Water’s” lifetime global total of roughly $2.32 billion to claim that third-place position outright.
According to Deadline, industry analysts have pointed to significant repeat viewership as a central driver behind the film’s extraordinary staying power at the box office, noting that audiences have been returning to theaters to see the film multiple times, a pattern that helps explain why the movie has maintained such unusually strong week-over-week grosses relative to typical blockbuster releases.
The film’s opening weekend alone set its own significant record, earning $360.1 million from 4,487 North American theaters, a figure that broke the previous domestic opening-weekend record of $357.1 million held by “Avengers: Endgame” since 2019. “Brand New Day” also became the second-fastest film in history to reach $1 billion at the global box office, accomplishing that feat in just six days following its release.
Forbes contributor Tim Lammers had flagged the approaching $900 million milestone as imminent as of Aug. 31, at which point the film had reached $891.8 million in domestic earnings through its 31st day of release, following its fourth consecutive weekend atop the domestic chart at that time. Box Office Watch’s tracking data placed the film at $891.5 million after 31 days, positioning it as on pace to become the fastest film in history to reach the $900 million domestic threshold, a projection that ultimately proved accurate when the film crossed the mark on Friday.
Industry watchers have noted that “Brand New Day” is unlikely to become the first film in history to reach $1 billion at the domestic box office alone, a milestone no film has yet achieved. However, the film remains firmly on pace to catch and surpass “The Force Awakens’” all-time domestic record within the coming days or weeks, according to multiple box office trackers.
The film’s continued dominance is expected to hold at least through the following two weeks, with “Brand New Day” not projected to lose its grip on the top box office spot until the horror franchise installment “Resident Evil” opens later this month, according to reporting from Central Jersey citing industry projections.
Beyond its box office performance, “Brand New Day’s” extended theatrical run has also contributed significantly to the broader summer 2026 box office season. According to Deadline, the film’s continued strength through Labor Day weekend has helped push the overall summer domestic box office toward a potential all-time record total of $4.76 billion, reflecting the outsized role the Spider-Man sequel has played in propping up theatrical attendance throughout what industry analysts had otherwise expected to be a comparatively subdued summer season for new releases.
“Brand New Day” stars Holland alongside Zendaya and Sadie Sink, continuing the Spider-Man film franchise’s recent run under Sony and Marvel Studios’ joint production arrangement. The film’s box office trajectory throughout the summer has consistently outpaced the historical release-window pace set by “The Force Awakens” a decade earlier, a comparison box office analysts have closely tracked given the two films’ shared status as the only movies in cinema history to reach the $900 million domestic threshold.
With Labor Day weekend’s final box office totals still being finalized, the precise timing of when “Brand New Day” will officially surpass “The Force Awakens” to claim the all-time domestic box office record remains uncertain, though multiple industry trackers now describe the outcome as effectively inevitable barring a dramatic and unexpected collapse in the film’s remaining theatrical run. For Sony and Marvel Studios, the milestone would mark a significant validation of the studios’ continued investment in the Spider-Man franchise, which has now produced what is on track to become the highest-grossing film ever released at the North American box office, unadjusted for inflation, more than a decade after “The Force Awakens” first set that benchmark in December 2015.
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