Why is it that in a picture of a woman eating salad, she is always smiling? Or when eating a red apple she is always wearing a luscious red lipstick?
Mouthful is an attempt at fiddling around with AI generated images for visual research purposes. It looks at the general internet visual culture around women and their relationship with eating. There always seems to be a fetishised/sensual overtone to almost any image of a woman eating, in any form on the internet. 
Surprisingly, when trying to generate images through AI with prompts like ‘a woman eating a sandwich’, the results gave pictures of women looking perfect and holding the food but not actually eating it. So to make it more realistic I tried prompts like  ‘a woman eating an ice-cream in a messy way’ which only generated hyper-sexualised pictures. Considering AI learns from existing data and images, this just proves how male gaze still very much shapes almost every aspect of women’s visual culture. So much so, that something as mundane as eating a sandwich is also viewed to be a sexualised, performative activity