This restaurant has reached 75,000 followers on Instagram thanks to photos of very appetizing dishes. Some shots are so perfect they don’t seem real. In fact they are not: it is all an invention generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The restaurant itself is a joke, yet thousands have fallen for it.
ETHOS | Photo from the fake restaurant’s Instagram profile
Bouquet of chicken wings, dinosaur-shaped croissant or hippo, a cheesecake with a piece of beehive on top and a pizza with Pikachu’s face. That food is one of the undisputed protagonists of social it’s a fact, but not everything we see is true and this ghost restaurant on Instagram is the clearest proof of this.
From what we read on its official account, the Ethos restaurant would be located in Austin, IN Texas, and from the photos posted, his dishes look really fantastic, perhaps a little too much. It boasts indeed 75,000 followers.
The only way to remove any doubts would be to visit it in person, too bad it’s in the bio there is no physical address and you can’t even find it by searching for the restaurant on Google. There is only the link to a website, it should be that of the restaurant: from the surface it seems possible to book, but the surprise is around the corner.
I entered a social network without human beings for the first time: I felt terribly alone
The story of the ghost restaurant
After seeing the dozens of photos of incredible dishes, many users have tried to book on the site which is linked in bio. The site seems realistic, complete with a description of the restaurant’s philosophy, of its menu and a gallery that presents for the umpteenth time dishes worthy of a star. When the mouth watering is skyrocketing, the aspiring customer tries to check the availability on the appropriate section, after a few seconds of loading: from the blank page appears a gif of a boy who receives a slap in the face.
The restaurant does not existit’s all a joke. Obviously the dishes don’t exist either: for the most part, you just need to look at them for a few seconds before being assailed by the doubt that they are creation of Artificial IntelligenceAnd. Here we leave you our guide on how to recognize images created by AI. To have a more certain answeryou can also use the different ones free software available online that allow you to recognize an image generated by AI.
Photos generated by AI
Fanpage.it tested it with some photos present on the ghost restaurant’s Instagram page, two of the least credible (the dinosaur-shaped croissant and the bouquet of wings) and two of the most plausible (one of the many burgers and the pizza with Pikachu). The outcome is always the same: all images were generated by AI.
The New York Post explains that when a local newspaper, Austin Monthly, tried to contact the owners of the account, it received a very aseptic response that did not go into detail about the matter. But, regardless of what the intentions of the creators of Ethos were, it is interesting, and in part unsettlingnote as a totally invented restaurant has reached 75,000 followers.
