Explainer
5 things to look out for when you generate content with AI.
Most advice on this is out of date. Six fingers and melted text were the 2024 tells, and the models have largely engineered them out. We tried four times to generate a six-fingered hand for this piece and were corrected every time. These five still catch bad output, and each one is shown twice: generated badly, then properly.
A mirror, a window, a puddle. A model paints what a reflection usually looks like instead of working out what this one should contain, so the copy drifts away from the original.
What we do Anything reflective gets held against what is actually in the frame.
Generated skin tends to come back uniform: no pores, no fine hair, no colour variation, perfectly symmetrical. It reads as beautiful for half a second and as plastic after that.
What we do We put texture back in on purpose, and reject faces that come back airbrushed.
This is the expensive one, and you can only see it if you have the real thing to compare against. So here it is first: a matte green bottle, brass cap, a terracotta band across the label and a small embossed mark below it. Now watch what happens when it is placed into a scene.
What we do Your product enters the work as an image, never as a sentence. One hero product per frame.
Big headline text is mostly solved. Small and background text is not: menu boards, shelf labels, packaging small print, a book spine. From across the room it reads as writing. Lean in and it dissolves.
What we do Type that has to be read is set in code and laid over the picture, never generated.
The quietest failure and the most common. With nothing steering it, a model does not just go plain, it goes awkward: subject dead centre and clipped, horizon off level, clutter competing behind, objects growing out of the subject, flat frontal light.
What we do Art direction is decided before anything is generated, and held against your brand after.
None of this is automatic. There is no setting for it: it is somebody opening the file, checking the five things above, and sending back what fails. That is most of the job, and it is the difference between content that looks made and content that looks generated.
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