ETHAN ROGACION
If you’ve recently been to The Lab at Kelburn campus, or its more recent off-shoot “Kimchi Noodle Bar”, chances are that you’ve noticed something… weird about their menus. It all looks really… glossy? And, is that a raw egg yolk sitting on top of a bed of vegetarian fried rice? No… it couldn’t be… DOES THAT HAND HAVE SIX FINGERS?
As you may have noticed, The Lab’s new offering appears to be using AI-based image generation in order to create images advertising their menu items. Some of the most egregious examples include an image of orange juice, surrounded by fake reviews. Additionally, a person with six fingers—who also apparently does not know how to use chopsticks—is shown picking up the noodle salad. The noodle salad appears to be comprised of nine cubes of assorted vegetables.
One eagle-eyed Salient reader wrote in to us, saying that, “[Kimchi Noodle Bar] are making the food, they should be able to take photos of it to advertise properly. Otherwise, I can’t trust that the food that they have is anything like what they show in the ‘photos’.”
Yuan Ng from The Lab told Salient that, “Whilst rebranding the store [from The Lab to Kimchi Noodle Bar], our photographer was unavailable to help us take any photo as they are away on a holiday.” Ng says that they used the “technology available to us all” in order to solve that problem.
It is unclear whether Kate Middleton took inspiration from The Lab or not—Salient has reached out to Buckingham Palace to confirm.