Don’t believe what you see in the age of AI ads

ADVERTISING has always walked a thin line between embellishment and fabrication. In the new age of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the latter is becoming easier.

Making an online ad no longer requires careful staging of well-lit photographs, because now they can be made and enhanced in fantastical ways. Consumers need to sharpen their wits as we move from unnaturally juicy hamburgers to depictions of people and food that aren’t physically plausible. Consider the bizarre “cheddar and cream cheese sauce for mac and cheese” pasta concoction that Instacart, the grocery-delivery service, used in its recent marketing.

Instacart has now deleted the Frankenstein’s monster of food and recipes that don’t (or probably shouldn’t) exist, which included fare such as “watermelon popsicles with chocolate chips”, which appears to have been conjured with new image-generation tools.