‘Lunchbox’ AI Generator Cooks Up Artistic Food Shots In An Instant
As artificial intelligence makes its way into the mainstream through chatbots and image creators, a new tool on the scene is eating into art generation to enable businesses to generate delectable pictures of food without a professional photographer.
Lunchbox, which uses a system based on OpenAI’s DALL-E, hopes to help restaurants and bars across the world spare the expense of having to break out the camera every time the menu changes.
Photographs have a greater impact on diners browsing a menu than one might think. CEO Nabeel Alamgir tells QSR that food items with an added image see up to 70% more orders and 65% higher sales than with just a text description.
At the moment, the text-to-image food generator is free and available to the public, allowing anyone to create a high-quality picture with just three parameters: a description of the food, an optional background, and an optional style of image.
Apart from just images of the food itself, users can request Lunchbox to create photographs of people eating the meal in question, together with different backgrounds, such as “wood” or “white”, or in a particular aesthetic.
In addition, the AI toolkit allows you to play with a variety of photography styles, ranging from iPhone-style photos to pictures emulating one taken from a film camera. There are even options to generate the image as a cartoon or painting.
However, as PetaPixel notes, not all consumers may be in favor of AI-generated images popping up on menus. Previously, Wendy’s and Burger King were involved in lawsuits for promoting foods that looked bigger in pictures than in reality.
