Smart phone cameras are very capable of food photography at the level required here. This is just bad business sense. That said, if you compare any mainstream fast food joint's photos to their actual meals you'll be equally disappointed and occasionally disgusted.
Even worse than that, AI are perfectly capable of generating very good images if you have some taste and a few keywords to prompt it. This shows that they have no taste, no care for their business and no shame
Just the fact that they're generating images of fictional food rather than taking pictures of the food they actually make shows that the restaurant has no taste or care, or has a reason to hide their cooking.
We have to quickly drop the expectation that the platonic ideal usage of AI is what we should expect to see. The typical use of it will be as a cheap/lazy labor machine like you say.
Wow. I was just planning on getting some food for an event Saturday evening and was looking through Doordash/Grubhub for spots nearby and so many of the menu "pictures" were AI-generated and really made me feel queasy. I had to stop the search after a while because I was getting plain disgusted! Glad it ain't just me (... well, not glad cuz this sucks, but nice to know I'm not particularly sensitive).
