Can AI Eat Ramen?

2024-11-212025-7-8

Anime illustration of a boy eating ramen with his hands

Hot! Watch out for burns.

Introduction

Hello, this is Easygoing.

Today, I’m introducing the hotly discussed AI Ramen Problem in the AI illustration world.

What is the AI Ramen Problem?

In the early days of AI image generation (around October 2022), it became a topic of discussion that "AI struggles to depict people eating ramen properly!"

#AI Ramen Challenge Drawings, Best Fan Art on pixiv, Japan

This issue was brought up about two years ago, but how does it stand today?

Stable Diffusion XL

First, let’s try with Stable Diffusion XL, the tool I primarily use (from July 2023 onwards).

A boy eating cup ramen in his apartment at night

A boy determined to eat ramen correctly despite his struggles — "Don't look at me!"

Stable Diffusion XL struggles to depict someone eating ramen properly.

Udon and Soba Face Similar Issues

It’s not just ramen. The same problem occurs with udon and soba noodles.

A woman awkwardly holding four chopsticks

The Core Issue: Bias in Training Data

Image generation AI learns from a massive dataset of images. One of the most commonly used datasets, such as LAION-5B, includes billions of images sourced from Pinterest, WordPress, Blogger, Flickr (Yahoo-related), and more.

AI learns to associate weights between images and related text, generating outputs that align closely with the input text.

Scarcity of Specific Images

Even with a vast dataset, narrowing conditions reduces the number of relevant images.

All images ⊇ Food-related images ⊇ Images of chopstick use ⊇ Images involving noodles

Images of people eating ramen with chopsticks become scarce, and capturing the precise moment of slurping ramen is almost non-existent due to cultural etiquette.

When AI cannot learn from accurate examples, it’s more likely to produce strange outputs.

How Do Other AIs Perform?

Let’s test other AIs, like Adobe Firefly Image3 (from April 2024).

A muscular man eating ramen with chopsticks in both hands — A smiling foreign bodybuilder eating ramen with chopsticks at a Japanese night stall. Food meets culture.

Another muscular man eating ramen with chopsticks—on closer inspection, the grip seems odd

Firefly performs much better, though the chopstick handling is still slightly off. Unlike LAION-5B, Firefly uses datasets from copyright-free images and Adobe Stock, providing high-quality training data.

For instance, if a user uploaded a ramen-eating photo series to Adobe Stock, AI could learn effectively from such quality inputs.