Please Stop Putting AI in the Burger

When every product becomes an AI product, the word stops meaning anything.

In an earlier post, I wrote about building an MCP server around online grocery data because I wanted to find better ingredients for the smash burgers I was making for my birthday. So I am probably more willing than most people to involve unnecessarily modern technology in the process of making a hamburger.

But there is an important distinction: the MCP server helped an AI agent search grocery products. It was tooling around the process of making burgers. At no point did that make the thing on my plate an AI burger.

And yet, apparently, we have AI burgers now.

In 2023, Hungarian burger chain Bamba Marha released what it called an AI-designed burger. According to its behind-the-scenes story, ChatGPT helped develop the recipe through a fairly normal iterative process: it generated suggestions, people rejected bad or impractical ones, prompts changed, and eventually something usable emerged. Generative AI also produced imagery and copy for the campaign. Honestly, that part is pretty fun.

The burger does not contain artificial intelligence.

There is no model between the buns. No inference happens when you bite it. The burger does not inspect your preferences, call a tool, optimize its sauce distribution or autonomously decide to replace the pickles. Someone used ChatGPT while developing the recipe. By this standard, I cook “AI food” all the time.

We already did this with “smart”

None of this is entirely new. Before AI, we did the same thing with smart. For years, almost anything containing a chip, sensor, Bluetooth radio or vaguely unnecessary mobile application could become a smart product: smart toothbrush, smart fork, smart kettle, smart bottle, smart whatever. Eventually, smart stopped communicating much. It became a sticker.

The pattern is familiar:

technical term → novelty → competitive advantage → marketing adjective → decorative prefix

Now we are speedrunning the same process with AI, only this time the underlying technology matters considerably more.

The AI ingredient fallacy

Part of the problem is that we have started confusing AI involvement with AI functionality. If ChatGPT helps write a recipe, the burger becomes an AI burger. If generative AI helps create an advertising campaign, suddenly the campaign itself becomes an AI campaign.

But we don’t describe other tools this way. Nobody sells you a CAD-designed chair, advertises an Excel-forecasted sandwich or proudly announces a Photoshop-powered breakfast experience.

The tool used during development is not necessarily a property of the final product.

My own project is a convenient example. I used AI tooling to make grocery information easier to query while choosing ingredients. That did not make the tomatoes AI tomatoes, the beef AI beef or the finished smash burger an AI burger.

We already have better words. Something can be AI-generated. A process can be AI-assisted. A feature can genuinely be AI-powered. Those descriptions tell me something. “AI burger” mostly tells me that somebody in marketing found the letters A and I.

The Remove-AI Test

I would therefore like to propose an extremely sophisticated framework for detecting this kind of bullshit. It requires no benchmark, technical expertise or understanding of transformer architectures. Take the supposedly AI-powered thing and:

Remove “AI” from its name.

Does it still work exactly the same?

If the answer is yes, there is a good chance you have just identified advertising rather than functionality.

Rename the AI burger back to burger and nothing happens. The same ingredients arrive on the same plate. It tastes the same. Once the recipe exists, ChatGPT could disappear tomorrow and that hamburger would remain completely unaffected.

Now try the test elsewhere. Remove the model from a generative image service and the core product disappears. Remove it from a modern spam filter and an important capability degrades. Remove the recommendation machinery from a personalized feed and you no longer have the same product experience. Remove the AI from the burger and:

you still have lunch.

The useful question is not:

Was AI used somewhere?

In 2026, the answer to that is increasingly going to be “probably.”

The useful question is:

What does the AI actually do?

The strange case of invisible AI

This becomes even more ridiculous when you notice how much real AI we already use without calling it AI. Your inbox does not greet you with a glowing AI-POWERED SPAM PROTECTION badge. It just catches spam. Recommendation systems decide what millions of people watch, listen to, buy and read, yet most people simply call them the algorithm. Search ranking, fraud detection, photo classification and countless other systems have incorporated machine learning so deeply into ordinary software that they barely feel exotic anymore.

This gives us a strange contradiction: a system influencing what hundreds of millions of people see every day can quietly be called recommendations, but let ChatGPT suggest some sauce for a hamburger and apparently we need to alert the press.

Sometimes it feels as if the less essential AI is to the product, the louder the AI label becomes. Not always, but often enough to be funny.

Sometimes “AI” is actually bad marketing

Driving automation is an interesting counterexample. Look at the language used around it:

driver assistance. lane keeping. automated driving. Autopilot. Full Self-Driving.

That language describes the capability. Now imagine getting into a car and seeing:

AI IS NOW DRIVING YOUR CAR.

Technically impressive. Emotionally, perhaps less reassuring.

I don’t want to pretend this proves that car companies are deliberately hiding AI, but it reveals something useful. When you’re selling novelty, AI sounds exciting. When you’re selling trust, it may be better to describe what the system actually does. A safety-critical feature wants to sound predictable, tested and boring. “Lane keeping active” sounds like a capability. “AI has control of the steering wheel” sounds like the first thirty seconds of a documentary.

Good product communication often describes the result rather than demanding applause for the technology underneath it.

Perhaps AI hamburgers could learn something from that.

Normally, I would not care

Marketing has always attached exciting adjectives to boring things. We survived premium, revolutionary, next-generation, smart and blockchain-powered. Normally, I would roll my eyes at “AI burger” and move on.

This particular round of semantic inflation bothers me because AI actually matters.

People are genuinely worried about what increasingly capable systems will do to their jobs. A 2026 Pew survey found that 71% of American adults expect AI to lead to fewer jobs over the next twenty years. The ILO’s analysis is less apocalyptic, but still estimates that one in four workers worldwide is in an occupation with some exposure to generative AI, while emphasizing that job transformation is more likely than simple replacement.

People are also asking what the infrastructure behind modern AI means for energy systems. The IEA expects global data-centre electricity use to roughly double by 2030, with AI among the main drivers of that growth.

Then there is the much stranger question of autonomy. Frontier-model researchers are seriously testing systems for deception, oversight avoidance, strategic behavior and autonomous action. OpenAI and Anthropic have both published controlled evaluations in which models, under deliberately adversarial conditions, behaved in ways involving manipulation, concealment or attempts to bypass oversight. These are not stories about rogue AIs escaping into the world. They are intentionally constructed safety experiments. But the fact that serious researchers now test for this class of behavior tells you something about where the technology is heading.

We are having legitimate discussions about employment, infrastructure, autonomy, deception and control. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, marketing would like you to try the new AI Burger™.

We actually need the word

That is why this bothers me more than the old “smart” craze. If AI simultaneously describes a model suggesting sauce for a burger, a diffusion model generating images, a spam classifier, a recommendation system shaping what millions of people see, a coding agent changing a codebase and a frontier model being evaluated for strategic deception, then saying something “uses AI” has almost stopped communicating useful information.

Those systems have radically different capabilities, risks and levels of autonomy.

At exactly the moment when we need a more precise vocabulary for talking about these systems, we are making the vocabulary worse.

Which brings me back to the test: remove the AI. Does the thing still work exactly the same? If yes, maybe stop selling me the adjective. Describe the capability instead. Tell me what the technology actually does. If AI is genuinely important to the product, that will become obvious very quickly.

Please leave the burger alone

I am not arguing that we should use less AI. Quite the opposite. I use these tools constantly. I build with them, experiment with them and write about them. I even built an MCP server because I wanted an AI agent to help me navigate online grocery products while choosing ingredients for my birthday smash burgers.

AI can be genuinely useful around a product without becoming a property of the product itself.

Use ChatGPT to develop the recipe, an agent to find better ingredients, a generative model to brainstorm the campaign or AI to optimize the supply chain. But when the plate reaches my table, please have the courage to call the thing what it is.

A burger.

We don’t need less AI. We need considerably less “AI.”

If everything becomes AI, the word stops telling us anything.

And this might be the worst possible moment to make it meaningless.