AI-powered restaurant app rates hotness of customers

The website, catering to 9,800 restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, allows its visitors to select where to dine based on an AI algorithm that evaluates the attractiveness of diners on a scale of 1 to 10, The New York Times reported.

Riley Walz, a 22-year-old programmer based in San Francisco, founded LooksMapping with the intention of using Google review data to make sarcastic observations about the restaurant industry. Walz used an AI model to collect 2.8 million Google evaluations, identifying 587,000 profile photos with distinctive traits among 1.5 million unique accounts. He next taught the model to determine whether the individuals were male or female, old or young, and hot or not.

"The website just puts reductive numbers on the superficial calculations we make every day," the website reads. "A mirror held up to our collective vanity."

The platform has yielded unexpected outcomes. Fanelli Cafe, a 178-year-old Soho staple in Manhattan, received a modest 4.1 out of 10 while Kiki's in Chinatown receieved an impressive 8.2. Chick-fil-A outperformed the trendy Gjelina in Los Angeles, with a score of 6.2 to Gjelina's 5.9, per The Times. However, these rankings have come under scrutiny due to their potential biases, particularly in the way AI interprets appearance.

Restaurant industry officials also don't seem to be too thrilled about the "hotness" app, saying that their restaurants should be evaluated on food and service quality, not the attractiveness of who walks into the door.