Essay · 5 min
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.
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.