The famous Will Smith spaghetti clip was two different videos: a glitchy AI experiment posted to Reddit in March 2023, and a human parody Smith shared on Instagram on February 19, 2024. Smith’s deliberately awkward performance played on the original’s failures—and later helped turn “Will Smith eating spaghetti” into an informal way to see how AI video generators handle people, food and motion.
What was the original Will Smith spaghetti video?
On March 23, 2023, Reddit user u/chaindrop posted an AI-generated clip to r/stablediffusion. Made with ModelScope text2video from the prompt “Will Smith eating spaghetti,” it attempted to show the actor eating but produced a visibly distorted result: Smith appeared to stuff clumps of pasta into his mouth with his hands. The awkwardness was the point of its appeal. It made the limits of early text-to-video generation easy to see.
Was Will Smith’s 2024 spaghetti video AI-generated?
No. Smith’s video was a human performance parodying the AI clip. He posted it on Instagram on February 19, 2024, during the attention around OpenAI’s Sora video-generation preview, after users began asking for a new version of the spaghetti test.
In the post, Smith placed the original and his own imitation side by side and captioned it, “This is getting out of hand.” He exaggerated the model’s visual mistakes by slurping noodles, pouring spaghetti into his mouth with his fingers and chewing on someone’s hair. Lil Jon’s 2006 song “Snap Yo Fingers” supplied the soundtrack. The joke depended on viewers recognizing that Smith was acting like a video generator that still struggled to make eating look natural.
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Some commenters wondered whether Smith’s clip was AI-made, but coverage described it as Smith performing the parody himself. Reports at the time said the post received more than 164,000 likes in three hours; that figure is a reported early tally, not a lasting engagement total.
Why did the clip become an AI video test?
“Will Smith eating spaghetti” is a compact, memorable prompt that puts several difficult video-generation problems in one scene. A model has to keep a recognizable person consistent from frame to frame, make hands and utensils interact plausibly with noodles, and depict chewing without the face or food visibly changing shape in implausible ways.
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- Temporal consistency: Does the person, plate and food remain coherent as the action unfolds?
- Identity and likeness: Does the subject continue to look like the intended person across frames?
- Object interaction: Do hands, fork, noodles and mouth connect in a believable way?
- Eating realism: Does chewing look plausible rather than morphing or jumping between poses?
- Audio: If sound is generated, does it fit the visible action?
As new video models appeared, people reused the prompt as an informal demonstration. After Google unveiled Veo 3 in May 2025, developer Javi Lopez posted a version of the test on X that went viral. In 2026, the prompt returned to headlines alongside Seedance 2.0, a video model linked to ByteDance. These episodes show how the meme became a recurring public comparison point, not that every clip was produced under controlled or identical conditions.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Does the spaghetti test prove which AI video model is best?
No. There is no independent quantitative score or official benchmark for the “spaghetti test.” A single clip can illustrate visible strengths and failures, but it cannot establish a model’s overall quality or support a rigorous model-by-model ranking. Results can depend on the prompt, settings, selected output and the specific task being attempted.
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Its value is as a quick visual stress test: viewers can readily spot problems with identity, motion and object interaction. It is a cultural shorthand for the progress—and persistent challenges—of AI-generated video, rather than a standardized evaluation.
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