Activision’s ‘AI slop’ Guitar Hero ad serves as market research for a non-existent game that may never come to fruition.

Activision’s social media post advertising a new entry in the Guitar Hero series is market research for a game that doesn’t exist, and is not meant to be an actual announcement, Eurogamer understands.

The fake advert – which has been dubbed “AI slop” for its use of poorly-generated imagery – is one of several tests currently being run across the publisher’s social media profiles.

These adverts also include new smartphone games in other Activision franchises such as Call of Duty and Crash Bandicoot that also don’t exist (yet) either.

Clicking on some of the adverts will take you through to a mocked up mobile store page organised by marketing service Geeklab, and then onto a survey that reveals “this isn’t a real game, but could be some day!”

Market research questions then include queries asking users what made them click on the advert and what gameplay features they expected the game to include, based on the fake advert.

Activision posts on Instagram and Facebook have similarly advertised “Call of Duty: Zombie Defender”, “Call of Duty: Sniper” and “Crash Bandicoot: Brawl”.

Artwork for the latter game, hosted on Facebook, again shows obvious use of AI image generation. One squirrel-like character appears to be missing half a face.

Will any of these Guitar Hero, Crash Bandicoot or Call of Duty smartphone games ever see the light of day? That remains to be seen. If and when they do, however, here’s hoping Activision hires some actual humans to work on their artwork.

Activision recently added a warning label to the Steam page for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 confirming the game “uses generative AI tools to help develop some in-game assets”, after players spotted various in-game examples – including a zombie Santa Claus with six fingers.