Google Menu and Algorithmic Weirdness
Sometimes, the internet can be very funny
Google has a feature, which is easiest to view on mobile, where it will show you the “menu” for a restaurant by displaying photos from reviews and pulling or generating captions for them.
It seems to work well enough for restaurants with actual menus. But I’ve discovered that for all-you-can-eat buffets, it is often spectacularly and humorously mistaken. I like writing about food and restaurants, and I’m also fascinated by internet weirdness, so this is a perfect lighthearted post to add some variety to my regular urbanism beat.
What follows is a series of screenshots from Google menu results for all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets, which speak for themselves in how off-base they are. What seems to be going on here is that a simple algorithm is trying to automatically crowd-source the restaurant’s menu based on the photos and text in the Google reviews. But buffet plates tend to be wacky combinations of food items, and the reviews are meandering and often critical. It’s a little like those automatic resume forms that populate based on a document you upload, but funnier. Whatever is exactly going on here results in some serious unintended humor.
A note: Several of the items are also severely misidentified. These are only a few: the “tater tots” are fried shumai dumplings; the “Potato Chip” are scallop shells stuffed with crabmeat; the “chicken wings” is a chicken foot, a popular dim sum item; the “jalapeno” is Chinese hot chili oil; the “Spaghetti with Meat Sauce” is hibachi lo mein. (And in a category all its own, the “flyed noodle” is probably a joke that Google accidentally identified as the name of a menu item.)
Enjoy!
This is almost a little like these images produced through Google’s DeepDream “artificial neural network” software, which, at best, resemble portraits painted by artists on LSD.
There are people who absolutely love the irrepressible and inherent weirdness of the internet. And there are people like me, who half-seriously proposes that the internet, and not the atomic bomb, was the most dangerous invention of the 20th century. That said, these little hilariously wrong buffet menu vignettes are a good bit of comic relief—and a good reminder that automation and artificial intelligence have a long, long way to go.
Related Reading:
If you like what you’re seeing, please consider a paid subscription to help support this work. You’ll get a weekend subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!