Generative media with a control layer
The hard part of generative media is not producing one good frame. It is the hundredth one matching the first, and the label still saying what the label actually says.
A product photography pipeline takes a phone photo in and returns a studio shot, behind an automated pass and fail gate with auto re-roll. The discriminator was measured rather than guessed: border colour and border texture carried no signal at all, reading identically on good and bad batches. What separated them was floor-band darkness, a 5th-percentile luminance of 52 on the bad batch against 90 to 159 on the good ones. The threshold sits at 90.
Label integrity is a separate guard that warps the original label pixels onto the generated bottle and fails closed: two of three generations died on "no label found" rather than shipping something plausible. Without it, at temperature zero, the fine print degraded into nonsense and the phone number changed by one digit.
The limits are documented as carefully as the wins. The gate cannot catch a wrong material or invented geometry, so a human pass on a contact sheet is still required. Real storefront photography measures at mean luminance 205 while the generated scenes came back between 55 and 137, up to four times darker and reading as a different company in feed. Realism and brand pulled in opposite directions, and brand won.
For video, type is burned in by code because the models garble text, a current video model cannot hold hands past about two seconds so hands get a still and a slow move instead, and scripted browser capture drives the cursor along Bezier paths with an eased clock, because evenly spaced replay reads as a robot.