Essay · 1 min read

Against generated slop

Generation is a production technique, not an aesthetic. What we refuse to ship, and why the brief is shown to you before the build exists.

By the Make It Playable team ·

Generated advertising has a recognisable smell: plausible layout, hollow specifics, a mechanic borrowed from a category the brand is not in. It happens when a model is asked to produce a finished artefact from a sentence, and nobody looks at the reasoning in between.

The intermediate step

In the studio the model does not go from a link to a playable. It goes from a link to a brief — brand summary, palette, logo, mechanic, end-card promise — and that brief is shown to you, editable, before a single line of the unit is written.

The reason is not ceremony. It is that every bad generated ad we have seen was a bad brief that nobody read. Correcting a mechanic in a brief takes ten seconds. Correcting it in a built unit costs a rebuild and a credit.

What we refuse

  • Invented claims, prices, ratings or offers that were not in the source material.
  • Mechanics chosen because they demo well rather than because they match the product's decision.
  • Stock cheerfulness in place of the brand's actual voice.
  • Disclaimers rewritten for rhythm.

Generation as production

Used honestly, the model does the part that was always mechanical: building four network variants of a unit, transpiling for an old WebView, packaging the zips, wiring the analytics events. Judgement stays where it was — with the person who knows the brand — and the machine takes the twelve hours of production that used to sit between an idea and a testable ad.

Have a playable ready to ship? Check it against every network with the free playable ad tester. No signup.

Keep going

Start with a link. Ship a playable.

Your first playable is free: the plan, the build and phone testing. Pick a plan to download it for your network, and that first ad is on us.