We’re constantly guessing where artificial intelligence (AI) will pop up next. For the restaurant industry, that answer lies in the delivery sector.
From consumer-facing photos to false deliveries and fraudulent refund claims, this new frontier is looking more like the Wild West.
Here are the three places where we’re seeing the most chatter about AI use — and misuse.
Delivery App Food Photos
Third-party delivery services including DoorDash and Uber Eats are making it easier for restaurants to showcase their dishes in the most beautiful light by encouraging the use of AI to enhance food shots for customers.
While it’s a great tool from a restaurant’s perspective (the cost of taking high-quality photos for use on these platforms could be unaffordable), some customers are taking to social media to call out the possibility of false marketing.
Folks have been suspecting potential AI use in delivery menu photos for years. While Business Insider reported in 2023 that some restaurants were using it to generate pictures from scratch, the third-party apps are now welcoming the shift by setting their own guidelines and practices.
As part of Uber Eats’s 2025 Merchant Impact Report, the company shared how its newest AI tool helps restaurants enhance the quality of their food photos.
“We’re using AI to detect and enhance low-quality food images — improving lighting, resolution, framing and plating — to help restaurants showcase their dishes more accurately while elevating the customer experience from discovery to checkout,” the company said. The tool can also be used to write dish descriptions.
On April 9, 2025, DoorDash announced new AI initiatives for merchants. The updates included an item description generator and several photo-specific tools. There’s an AI-powered camera to optimize lighting and backgrounds, as well as one called Background Enhanced Menu Photos which helps transform customer photos into “clean, professional menu photos” — all “without altering the appearance of the food itself.”
Customer-Manipulated Photos for Refunds
When an order arrives at your door, but the food is in some way inedible (think soup spilled out of a container, a sandwich smashed inside its box, etc), customers have the ability to report that through the app and get a refund.
This has long presented some issues for the gig workers making deliveries. But recently, folks on social media have said they’ve used altered images to get refunds on meals that arrived in perfectly fine condition.
One X user posted before and after photos of a hamburger with the caption, “Editing my pictures so I can get my money back on DoorDash” — they had changed the color of the interior meat to look raw.
Another person on Threads claimed to have Photoshopped the inside of a piece of chicken to also appear raw.
“Photoshopped my food so DoorDash can give me my money back food stamps ain’t coming next month,” another user wrote on the platform. According to the screenshots, the user was refunded $26.60 in credits.
It is not clear how widespread this practice has become — TODAY.com was only able to track down the two examples above — but the delivery companies may be catching on.
“We have zero tolerance for fraud and we want to be clear: trying to game the system with a fake image might seem clever in the moment, but it’s not worth a permanent ban over a $20 order,” a representative for DoorDash tells TODAY.com, speaking generally about customers submitting fake images.
When asked about whether this has turned into a problem for delivery workers, Ligia Guallpa, executive director of Worker’s Justice Project (WJP) and co-founder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, says not yet.
“In the delivery community, [some folks] may have heard stories here and there, but we have not seen it being a common practice,” Guallpa says.
But, she says, refund requests that claim delivery worker liability can have detrimental consequences.
“The biggest complaint that deliveristas have is how the apps are aggressively punishing them for things that are out of their control.” She adds that when customers complain about damaged foods, it is often the driver who is punished either with a bad rating or being “deactivated.”
Guallpa, who works directly with delivery drivers, says drivers are often not given the chance to contest. A representative from DoorDash says this claim is inaccurate for their platform, adding that there is an appeals process available to all of its gig workers. Neither Uber Eats nor GrubHub responded to TODAY.com’s request for comment.
The WJP had around 1,500 cases of deactivation at the time of reporting. Guallpa says many were categorized as being due to “fraud,” but that no evidence was provided.
Fake Deliveries
In late December, a photo circulated around the internet of a customer claiming their DoorDasher faked a delivery using an AI-generated photo of the food in front of their house. Finance blogger Byrne Hobart alleged that his food order was immediately picked up by a Dasher and marked as complete, even though he hadn’t gotten his food.
Hobart posted this on X, though TODAY.com was not able to independently verify the incident, and Hobart did not respond to a request for comment.
When asked about whether DoorDash is aware of anyone — employed by them or not — abusing the system, a representative said there are systems in place to quash it.
“We have strict anti-fraud protocols that combine technology with human review to identify instances where AI may have been used for fraud, such as manipulated images or fake delivery photos,” the rep tells TODAY.com. “While these incidents are exceedingly rare, we permanently deactivate any accounts found to be engaged in such behavior.”
When asked about how the company stops bad actors from abusing the system, the representative says DoorDash is “unable to disclose specific fraud-prevention techniques in order to prevent bad actors from leveraging that knowledge of how we combat misuse to game the system.”
Representatives for Uber Eats and Grubhub did not respond to TODAY.com’s requests for comment.
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