If you’ve tried using AI to create ads, and the results were even more disappointing than a dessert recipe that was trending on TikTok… I’ve got the fix. (For your ads. Not the Dubai chocolate whipped cream cronut soufflé. That’s beyond saving.)

Here’s why ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are so bad at writing ads that actually convert.

Generative AI isn’t designed to create something original. It’s designed to synthesise something that seems original, but is really just assembled from all the existing parts already lying around the internet.

A bit like that soufflé, actually.

So when you say “write me a Facebook ad”… what you get is a Frankenstein’s monster of old ideas, outdated angles, and over-used templates. Ads that look and feel like everybody else’s. Modelled on what was working last year, not what’s working now.

And when you say “make it funny”?

It gets worse.

Because comedy works by breaking patterns. The setup builds an expectation. The punchline destroys it. That’s why it’s funny - your brain was certain it knew where the sentence was going, and then it didn’t.

But Generative AI is literally a pattern-completion engine. You’re asking it to break the thing it was built to follow. It’s like asking a sat-nav to get you lost on purpose.

So it gives you “jokes” that aren’t funny. Or jokes that don’t make sense. Or, worst of all, jokes that are technically structured like jokes but land with all the entertainment value of a Terms & Conditions update.

Which is why most people try AI for their ads once, get garbage, and go back to writing boring copy by hand.

But here’s the thing.

The problem isn’t AI. The problem is what you’re feeding it.

When you’ve been writing comedy for as long as we have, you realise there’s a rhythm to it. Every joke has a scaffold - a structure underneath it that makes it work. And once you’ve written one joke using that scaffold… it’s actually really easy to write another one. And another. And another.

The structure is repeatable. Even if the jokes are all completely different.

Which means if you give AI the right scaffold, with an example joke and fill-in-the-blanks instructions… it stops trying to “be creative” and starts executing a proven pattern.

And suddenly it’s really, really good at it.

That’s the principle behind every single feature we’ve built into Brian.