Sure, they went through a long process of dressing them up as nice as possible. But they were still just ideal versions of the thing you actually receive. While the AI food looks pretty much nothing like what the restaurant is actually making.
And outside of mega chains like McDonalds, most restaurants used fully real images.
There is a large industry based around faking food, you can watch some pretty interesting videos on the process and you will quickly find that they rarely use anything resembling the actual food you will be eating.
Japan is an extreme example, but there they literally use wax models to advertise their food.
Those fake food models are still made to look just like the actual meal. I don't know if you've looked at any of these AI food pictures but they look nothing like the end result. And they are also signalling low effort and low initial investment unlike commissioning custom models of ramen bowls.
I've been to plenty of local joints where photos clearly a) weren't taken by them, and b) didn't at all match the food. Still delicious food for a good price, but the picture is more a vague idea of what it could look like if you payed 3x as much somewhere else. It's been that way for as long as I can remember.
Yes and no. Magazines, newspapers, highly profitable restaurants, and professional publications employ food photography. The local greasy spoon did not. Now instead of sloppy burgers and pizza pics, I get weird AI blobs of pepperoni. (Real example.)
Dressing up a pizza so it photographs well is different than an AI generated pizza. Maybe I cannot perfectly articulate that, but I'm confident
Very much agree. Traditional food photography is kind of just enhanced reality, better lighting, structurally placing and fixing everything in it's ideal position, substitutes for things that would melt under studio lights.
While AI food is like some kind of fever dream alternate reality that has no connection to the thing you'll actually receive.
