Designer Joe Ben Taylor took to LinkedIn yesterday to call out Lovable for running Meta ads that passed his original design work off as something their tool created. Lovable shut the ads off after 9 hours of them running and commented on Joe's post to say so, but they did not provide any explanations or solutions.
Their comment reads "We’ve discontinued this ad everywhere and are investigating how this happened" and they included their general support email. It's a response that both fails to acknowledge the gravity of stealing someone's intellectual property and doesn't provide a legitimate contact to actually address the problem. This is the kind of situation where an executive should have stepped in to offer a personal resolution path.
Joe says he didn't use Lovable in any part of the design process, that the project was "designed by hand, developed by hand." He did use a couple other AI tools for image generation and website performance optimization, but neither of those tools was Lovable. He used ImagineArt and Claude. He also wrote that "Every interaction, every animation, every design decision and every line of code was the result of genuine human craftsmanship" and that the website took two months of work. The website he designed was for Forge Automotive, a custom vehicle manufacturing company in the UK, and it's won several awards including "Site of the Day" on both Awwwards and CSS Design Awards.
You can still see Lovable's ad with Joe's exact design on their Instagram and, even though it only ran for 9 hours (according to Facebook's ad library), it racked up 658 likes and 103 comments as of this writing, which means it reached thousands more people. There were four different versions of the ad and it looks like they ran in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Ireland across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Joe lives in the United Kingdom.
This comes at a particularly devastating time for Joe, who lost his job of 7 years working for design firm L+R last week. Designers today are not only battling theft from AI companies like Lovable, but they're also fending off Meta, who generates ad creative without a care in the world who they're stealing that from. Just last week, Bookshop had to make a statement about Meta ads that autogenerated, unwanted AI versions of their creative. It's possible something similar happened here where Lovable didn't knowingly take Joe's work, but instead, Meta did. I'm speculating that possibility based on all the news about Meta scraping our websites for content.
Lovable hasn't gotten back to Joe with any answers, as of this publishing, nor have they responded to my requests for comment to their press department. I find their response to Joe's post to be inadequate and concerning as a tool that caters to designers. Whether this was their fault or Meta's, someone at Lovable needs to explain what the hell happened.
