Activision is once again in trouble with fans over generative AI. Just a week after admitting to using the Generated AI in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on many assets, publishers are now accused of using Generated AI again to promote another game: Guitar Hero Mobile. But even as viewers criticize the promotion, Sharp-Eyed fans have discovered that Guitar Hero Mobile may not even be a real game to begin with.
As reported by Insider Gaming, the issue’s generation AI appears to be used in the newly announced Instagram ads for Guitar Hero Mobile posted two days ago. This ad features four guitar players on stage in very similar poses. Similarly surrounded by warped speakers with Blobby’s red guitar, it looks suspicious like a washing machine or a lumpy microphone right behind it.
Before them there is an audience with many visible legs that appear to belong to no one, and the center down is a guitar hero track with accidentally colored tracks and smelly, inconsistent notes. To sum up, all of these issues are clever signs of generative AI art, and given Activision’s recent track record, it’s likely that it’s happening.
The fans are furious in the comments. Read one response: “It shows how much effort it took to this when you can’t get your game right.” Another calls the ads “lazy AI slops,” while another reads “I’d think a huge company like Activision has a real graphic designer budget.” The fourth said, “Wow. They still seem to be using Midjourney 1.0. Ai Art hasn’t seen anything worse since the early days.”
But this is not where strangely generated AI ads end. As several websites like Time Extension and 80.LV have pointed out, Activision appears to have quietly dropped many generative AI-created ads on Instagram to shatter games that have not been announced by the company. These include Call of Duty Zombies mobile games, what’s called Call of Duty: Sniper, and what’s called Crash Bandicoot Brawl. At the time of writing, none of these ads have been published on Activision’s official Instagram, but Guitar Hero Mobile Game ads are available through direct links.
What makes this even more strange is that fans were able to find Guitar Hero Mobile pages on a website called GeekLab. GeekLab is a user acquisition and insights company that allows publishers to create “looking” store pages for mobile games to test user interests. When you click “Get” on the Guitar Hero Mobile page, users will take part in a survey that claims, “This is not a real game, but it may be someday!” And I ask them a lot of questions about why they clicked on the ads and how possible it is to play something like Guitar Hero Mobile.
Official: Activision is currently considering creating a new COD Zombies mobile game. Kicker?
They use AI-generated ads to attract interest in it.
Complete story below:
Recently, an official Call of Duty Instagram ad was posted a few hours ago… pic.twitter.com/cqeqyivwfq
– COD: Zombies News (@margwanetwork) February 28, 2025
What appears to be happening here is that Activision has launched some sort of advertising campaign to measure user interest in many possible mobile games that do not yet exist. These games are not realistic, so they used the generation AI for advertising art and were confused by fans who were surprised by the real guitar hero mobile games.
This happens a week after Activision, where we have been granted the use of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. It said in January that the generated AI assets were actually discovered and called out, but it took the publisher almost three months to admit that they had used the generated AI in Call of Duty Loading screens, call cards, and other in-game art.
Activision declined to comment on the film to Passthecontroller.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter at Passthecontroller. You can find her posts at Bluesky @Duckvalentine.bsky.social. Do you have any tips for the story? Send to [email protected].
