The Map Rating Restaurants Based on How Hot the Customers Are

New York Times

5 days ago

Once a stopover for starving artists and gin-blossomed locals, Fanelli Cafe in Manhattan has become the choice meeting place for micro-celebrities brandishing hot dogs and Miista-heeled shoppers craving mid-spree martinis. In its 178 years on the corner of Mercer Street and Prince Street, the SoHo standby has never been hotter. The diners there, however, are more like a 4.1 out of 10.
At least, according to a GeoCities-esque website called LooksMapping.
LooksMapping is a digital heat map that claims to show 'which restaurants have the most attractive diners — according to AI.' Visitors to the site can toggle among 9,800 restaurants in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to see how an artificial intelligence model rates the hotness of diners on a scale of 1 to 10.
'This website just puts reductive numbers on the superficial calculations we make every day,' its homepage reads. 'A mirror held up to our collective vanity.'
LooksMapping was created by Riley Walz, a 23-year-old programmer in San Francisco with a penchant for using Google review data to make sardonic observations about the restaurant industry. Mr. Walz was also one of three people behind Mehran's Steak House, a fake restaurant with a near-perfect Google rating that opened for one night in 2023.
To create LooksMapping, Mr. Walz left his laptop open over a weekend as an A.I. model scraped 2.8 million Google reviews. From 1.5 million unique accounts, it identified 587,000 profile images with distinguishable faces. Mr. Walz then prompted the model to extrapolate whether those pictured were young or old, male or female, and, to put it in vintage internet terms, hot or not.
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