We always expect what was promised to be different than what was delivered to some degree, but I'm not sure restaurants have fully weighed the expectations-vs-reality backlash this may cause... uncannily-wrong details aside for a sec, the AI pics always set michelin-level presentation expectations. The final promise-vs-plate pics in this post were pretty dramatic.

There's always a class of restaurants where they don't care about repeat visitors. Think the cafe in front of a major tourist attraction: every day brings a new busload of 1-time patrons, those will always want the michelin-level pics to bait the 1-time foot-traffic in. The danger is the neighborhood mom-and-pops will start using the same trick without understanding they need repeat customers, and repeat disappointment kills a repeat audience.

But who knows... people with a TV budget have been using glue in their cheesy pizza commercials, soap in their beer glass foam, and motor oil on their pancake stacks for a long time -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k7PJoNAXkk -- maybe this is just equalizing the enshittified food playing field.

For now I have the opposite problem. The AI pics look way worse than the food they have, which is unfortunate for mom-and-pop businesses.

I actually had the opposite reaction - the AI image looked grotesque, and the the real food was like "oh damn this looks like good food."