Lovable Ad Passed Off a Designer’s Handmade Website as A.I. Work
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
Lovable used a paid Instagram ad to show a designer’s handmade Forge Automotive site as if A.I. built it. The company apologized and pulled the ad, but the authorship mess is exactly the point.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Lovable, the Swedish vibe-coding start-up that sells websites and apps from a text prompt, has apologized after running a paid Instagram ad that presented a handmade site as its own work. The ad showed the Forge Automotive website on a laptop and was labeled as advertising. But the designer behind it says Lovable had nothing to do with building it.
That designer is Joe Taylor, who says in a LinkedIn post that he made the Forge site himself, by hand, over two months of work. He says he used no A.I. website builder at all. The only A.I. he used, according to his account, was ImagineArt for some imagery and Claude for quality assurance and performance tweaks. Everything else — the interactions, animations, design decisions and code — came from him.
Taylor, who works as a designer at 12 Studio, says Forge Automotive is a client of that agency. On his Dribbble profile, he lists the Forge project and describes himself as a designer and developer. He’s not arguing against A.I. tools in general. His complaint is narrower and sharper: Lovable, in his view, took someone else’s work and turned it into marketing for a product that did not build it.
Lovable responded directly under his post, saying: “Hi Joe, we’re so sorry this happened. We’ve discontinued this ad everywhere and are investigating how this happened.” The company asked him to contact support by email. How the ad got approved, and whether there will be any agreement with Taylor or his agency, is still unknown.
The episode lands in a much bigger fight over who gets credit, and who gets paid, when A.I. companies use creative work. Earlier this year, around 800 artists, authors, actors and musicians backed the “Stealing Isn’t Innovation” campaign and demanded licensing deals and the right to refuse use of their work for generative A.I. This case isn’t about training data. It is about advertising. But the instinct is the same: someone else’s work gets swallowed by the machine, then sold back as proof that the machine did it.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the sort of sloppy A.I. marketing that keeps writing checks its product can’t cash. If a company can’t even verify the origin of the website in its own ad, its “trust us, we built this” pitch deserves a hard laugh. Creative work isn’t free stock footage for startups with a prompt box.
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