Just Eat has apologised after an AI image generation tool it provided to food outlets produced bizarre images for food items.

The company said the tool was designed to offer images for items that didn’t yet have one provided by the vendor, but the mishap raises questions about the utility of such a feature.

The images included misinterpretations of terms, such as a picture of bacon and eggs floating in a glass of cola that was provided in the menu of a Northern Ireland restaurant.

The restaurant offers breakfast sandwiches on a range of soda breads, and the tool apparently misunderstood the word “soda”.

Other errors were generated by misspellings, such as an offering of “scrabbled eggs” that was accompanied by an image of scrambled eggs imprinted with a Scrabble-style letter.

Users said the outlandish AI-generated images, which are labelled as such, are common across the Just Eat platform.

In another example, the tool generated an image of chips with a large amount of salt and pepper on them for “salt and pepper chips” – a dish that in reality, involves frying chips with onions, garlic and chillies.

“I swear if my salt and pepper chips come like this I’m going to cause murder,” wrote one user in a social media post.

Just Eat said it was trialling AI-enhanced images and acknowledged that “it isn’t always quite right the first time”.

The company said it was in the process of removing the incorrect images and would pause rolling out the AI tool while it carries out further development.