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Use AI ad images that look real, not AI-made

Oct 11
4 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Public-domain art plate: Audubon — Painted Finch, Birds of America (1827-1838)
This image shows a Painted Finch from John James Audubon's The Birds of America (1827-1838). Audubon drew its real colors from life.

Shoppers did not avoid AI ads. They avoided ads that looked AI-made.


The study. Researchers from TUM, Columbia and Harvard studied 305,121 display ads on Taboola. These ads had more than 16.4 billion impressions. An impression is 1 time that a site shows an ad. The researchers compared AI-made and human-made images in the same campaign on the same day.


The finding. The click-through rate is the percentage of impressions that become clicks. On average, AI images had the same click-through rate as human images. But ads that looked AI-made got fewer clicks. AI images that looked real had a click-through rate of 0.79%. AI images that looked AI-made had a click-through rate of 0.62%.

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