AI food images miss the appetite test

A preregistered study of 87 participants comparing 120 matched food images found AI-generated stimuli scored lower than real images on realism and willingness to eat, while calorie and healthiness ratings did not differ. The Scientific Reports study says the result makes synthetic images plausible for some controlled research uses, but not a drop-in proxy for appetitive response; 11 of 14 AI images that beat their real counterparts on realism also won on willingness to eat. Creative-AI teams testing food, health, or advertising concepts should separate factual attribute judgments from behavioral response, as the archive’s clinical-AI evidence gate does for simulated medical performance.