Sam Ford Collins
Graded in public · Video series

AI slop, annotated.

Real AI-generated marketing, pulled from the wild and graded against Anthropic's 4 D's of AI fluency. What went out, why it reads as slop, and the line that would have caught it before it carried the brand's name.

New episodes land on LinkedIn and YouTube, and the archive lives here. Companion reading: Where AI belongs, and what stays human.

Latest · This week on LinkedInThe caption that cost millions: you spend seven figures on a sponsorship, then let a bot announce it with a "that's not X, that's Y." (DiGiorno lives in all of us.)

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Start here · The grading system

The four D's.

Every episode grades one real ad against Anthropic's 4 D's of AI fluency. Read these once and the grades explain themselves.

Delegation
What goes to AI at all. Some work is the brand (taste, authorship, symbolic meaning), and that work stays human. The first grade is whether anyone made that call on purpose.
Description
How it's briefed. AI gets a territory, not a blank page: tone rules, visual lexicon, red lines. A vague brief is a grade earned before the output exists.
Discernment
A human with taste judging the output. It's the most-failed D by a distance, and if nobody looked hard before the work went out, it shows.
Diligence
Owning the result. The brand's name is on it, so "the AI did it" is not a defense. Somebody signs the work.
Episode 03 · July 2026

The bicycle Meta improved.

REI ran campaigns on Meta. The Advantage+ enhancements, on by default, decided their bicycle needed a second set of handlebars, mounted under the seat and facing backwards. Nobody chose it, which is exactly what should worry you. Auto-enrollment means the platform is editing your product photography unless you tell it not to.

The line that would have caught itAI gets a territory, not a blank page. If a platform can alter the product image, the territory was never drawn. Go check what Advantage+ is "enhancing" in your campaigns this week.
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Episode 02 · June 2026

Skechers takes the test.

One real Skechers ad, graded against the 4 D's. It earns some and drops others, and the difference is visible from across the room. The pattern to watch: the D's it fails are the human ones. Delegation was fine; discernment never showed up for work.

The line that would have caught itThe dividend is judgment. If AI saved the team an afternoon and nobody spent ten minutes of it looking hard at the output, the trade went backwards.
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Episode 01 · June 2026

The first specimen.

Narwhal Labs, graded against all four D's. Let's just say it didn't earn them. It was technically fine and instantly generic. It could run under anyone's logo, which is a problem when it's running under yours.

The line that would have caught itSome work is the brand. If the output could sit under anyone's logo, it never should have gone out under this one.
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