2022. AI image generators are amazing. However, there is still room for improvement.

Take burgers, for example. AI had no idea how to make burgers look delicious. McDonald’s knew they could help.

After all, McDonald’s mission is to serve tasty burgers even in the virtual world.

Throughout its history, McDonald's had amassed a vast collection of images of delicious-looking burgers and possessed knowledge of deliciousness. McDonald’s developed “McDIFFUSION”, the AI image generator as “burger-specialist” with their data & knowledge. By combining Stable Diffusion, an image generation AI that can be additionally trained by data, with data and knowledge held by McDonald's, the world's first AI burger-specialist was created that can make any ingredient and any dish into a delicious burger. We released this AI as a web application that allows anyone to generate delicious-looking burger images and post them on social networking sites.

For McDIFFUSION, McDonald's combined images and video footage accumulated from previous commercials and product shoots with newly shot burger images to create additional data for Stable Diffusion to learn from. McDIFFUSION did not simply use McDonald's burger images as learning data for Stable Diffusion, but also analyzed the overlap of McDonald's burger buns, lighting, and the build of ingredients. The results of these analyses were used to ensure that the AI-generated images reflected McDonald's definition of burger taste.

To develop an AI that understands “taste”, we “fed” McDonald’s zillions of food images, videos and data into AI. In addition, McDonald's leveraged its knowledge of how to make burgers look irresistible, gained through years of commercial production and product photograph.

The AI's accuracy improved with the help of food stylists, photographers, and other experts who repeatedly reviewed visual expressions, from how the burgers are overlapped, attractively lit, to how the ingredients are arranged.

McDonald’s know-how helped teach the AI how to create mouth-watering burger images.　

McDIFFUSION went viral after its launch. In just two weeks, fans created over 110,000 new burgers.

Impressions on Twitter exceeded 84 million and the media exposure reached over USD465,000.

In addition, we shared images in the public domain as learning materials, which inspired even tastier burger images.

Meanwhile, McDonald's is currently using the AI-generate images to develop new products.