After several customer complaints about the use of AI-created images of dishes and food on Zomato, CEO Deepinder Goyal announced on Sunday that the company is removing these images from its platform.
The AI-made visuals were added initially to make the dishes listed on the food delivery service more appealing and presentable. However, the same were being removed, Goyal revealed on X.com, after he had "received many complaints about these misleading images."
He explained that these images, thanks to AI, would not only "lead to breach of trust between customers and restaurants" but also "increase refunds and lower customer ratings."
“At Zomato, we use various forms of AI, to make our workflows efficient. However, one place where we strongly discourage the use of AI is images for dishes in restaurant menus,” Goyal said.
“We urge our restaurant partners to avoid using AI for dish images in restaurant menus from now onwards,” the CEO said, adding that the platform “will actively start removing such images from menus by the end of this month”.
A year ago, Zomato had rolled out PicNic AI, a solution to enhance the visual quality of food images on the platform and help the restaurant partners improve the presentation of dishes.
He further added that Zomato is going to “stop accepting AI-generated dish images (as much as we can detect them using automation)”.
He called on both restaurant owners and in-house marketing team “to stop using AI-generated images for marketing purposes”.
“Restaurant owners – if you haven't yet invested in real food shots for your menu, please reach out to our catalogue support team, to schedule a photoshoot”.
“This is offered to you as a pass-through cost; Zomato doesn't make any money as part of this process,” Goyal said.
Separately, Zomato had recently posted a 74 per cent year-on-year rise in revenue at Rs 4,206 crore for Q1, FY25. The net profit of the company surged more than 126 per cent to Rs 253 crore during the April-June quarter or Q1, FY25 from Rs 2 crore during the same quarter a year ago.
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