A study by Sung and Mayer (2012) suggests that any graphic in a learning experience will fall into one of these three categories: Instructive images: These visuals directly support learning and facilitate essential cognitive processing of core concepts. For example, a diagram illustrating Porter’s Five Forces can help students better understand this business strategy framework. Decorative images: These graphics enhance aesthetics but don’t influence learning. For example, an image of a business handshake can be visually appealing but won’t support or obstruct students’ understanding of negotiation strategies. Distracting images: Sung and Mayer call this category “seductive” images. While these visuals may relate to the topic, they impede learning because they require extraneous cognitive processing. As an example, consider a complex organizational chart of a full corporation in a lesson on team leadership. The image connects broadly to the lesson but also highlights a lot of irrelevant details, distracting students from the key concepts.

First, we prompt seven state-of-the-art generative text-to-image models (DALL-E 3, Midjourney v6, Firefly 2, Imagen 2, Imagine, Realistic Vision, and Stable Diffusion XL Turbo) to create 10,320 synthetic marketing images, using 2,400 real-world, human-made images as input. 254,400 human evaluations of these images show that AI-generated marketing imagery can surpass human-made images in quality, realism, and aesthetics. Second, we give identical creative briefings to commissioned human freelancers and the AI models, showing that the best synthetic images also excel in ad creativity, ad attitudes, and prompt following.