Artificial intelligence can guess what a plate of food will look like just by reading the recipe. Many of the images it generates look realistic, but others look barely edible.

The AI was trained on 52,000 pairs of recipes and images of the resulting plate of food. One part of the system learnt to create images by reading the recipes, whilst a second attempted to distinguish the generated images from real ones . By repeatedly trying to make images indistinguishable from …