Your AI Ads Look Cheap, and It’s Almost Always These 3 Things
Plastic skin, flat light, a locked camera. The three tells that make an AI ad look cheap, and the fixes we use on Chromatic every day.
The internet is full of AI slop, but that does not mean AI cannot make good content.
Two people can use the same model and the same product image, and one ad looks like a render while the other looks like someone actually shot it. The difference is a few details the model will not add on its own.
We make ads on Chromatic every day. When one looks off, it almost always comes down to three things: the skin, the light and the camera.
The most common one is the skin.
Look at her face on the left. There are no pores or marks, and the skin is one flat tone from forehead to chin. Everything looks a little too perfect.
This is what AI does by default. It gives you a plastic surface instead of skin, and the eye catches it immediately, even when you cannot say what is wrong.
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Now look at the one on the right. She has freckles, visible skin texture and loose strands of hair. The light comes from one side, so it falls on one half of her face more than the other.
The fix?
Tell the model what a real face has: texture, marks, uneven hair and light from one direction.
That was the first of three. The second decides whether your character looks like they are in the scene or pasted onto it.
The third is something almost every AI video does and real footage almost never does.
Both are in the full post, with side-by-side examples.
Here is what it looks like when all three are right.
Generated in one shot from a single product image with the UGC Talking Character skill on Chromatic.
