AI-generated ads dropped the ball on this year’s Super Bowl

It sounds like everyone who produced it Advertising spots for this year’s Super Bowl With AGI failing in terms of making AGI seem useful or something worth getting excited about. Although we’ve seen plenty of AI-generated commercials before (in… Previous Super Bowlsno less), this year’s event was saturated with them. This is partly because image and video generation models have become somewhat more sophisticated in the past year — though still subpar compared to what humans create — and are better enough for a number of brands to now be comfortable attaching their names to AI-derived footage.

It’s also much cheaper and faster to use new-generation AI, which is appropriate when 30-second ads in this year’s Super Bowl cost between $8 million and $10 million. With traditionally produced ads from previous Super Bowls, you can really see how spending money on production ultimately resulted in commercials that were more memorable than what you’d normally see on TV. But this year, there was a cheap and dirty quality to many of the ads that was undeniable. Here are some of them.

One of the worst examples of this is the Artlist ad. The main thrust of the ad (which only aired in New York and Los Angeles) from Israeli creative company Artlist is that anyone can create Super Bowl-worthy video footage using the company’s suite of production tools. It’s even bragging rights that Artlist purchased its Super Bowl space about a week ago and only spent five days producing the commercial. It would be impressive if Artlist’s final product actually looked like something that would make everyday consumers want to use these tools.

Instead, the ad showcases the defining characteristics that convinced people to view the AI-generated video as sloppy. Instead of saying something short and convincing, coherent Any story of any kind, the ad is a series of very short clips of animals doing strange things, accompanied by a voiceover. There is nothing innovative about this. Considering how much chaos there is already in the world, the whole thing seems like a threat rather than a promise of good things to come.

For its Super Bowl presence, vodka brand Svedka — owned by Sazerac — has revived its old drink. CGI fembot charactergave her a new male show companion called Brobot, and dropped an android pair in a commercial that was almost an entity created with general artificial intelligence. Although Fembot was once part of the larger Svedka brand and always seemed…so, everything about Brobot’s character feels like a scam I am a robotThe character “Sonny” played by Alan Tudyk in the 2004 film.

talking to Hollywood Reporter Before the Super Bowl, Sarah Saunders, Sazerac’s chief marketing officer, said using AI to create the ad didn’t save the company much time or money. Instead, Sazerac saw that the aesthetics of AI could resonate thematically for a vodka brand, and the company believed the ad could convey an “ultimately pro-human” message.

The ad’s story is pretty straightforward: Two robots show up at a club, remove bottles of vodka from their bodies, and then proceed to drink while standing in the middle of a crowd of strangely dancing humans, created by artificial intelligence. We’re supposed to understand that alcohol helps machines break free in a very humane way. But what stands out most about the ad is the way the Brobot starts short-circuiting after taking a drink, which immediately starts spilling onto its chassis because the machine’s mouth is not connected to an internal system of pipes meant for handling liquids.

Although Sazerac says the bot’s glitch is intentional, it looks a lot like the kind of gross, episodic video output that AI models have been known to generate without being explicitly asked to do so. The sequence reads as if the Brobot character is breaking himself down by interacting with Svedka’s product, which isn’t exactly the kind of message alcohol companies are known to rely on. Sazerac can try all it wants to spin the Svedka ad as a win that aligns with the vodka’s brand identity, but the most pro-human thing the company could have done in this situation is to hire more humans to develop a better idea.

Clearly, we’re not alone in our feelings about the less polished production process of the AI ​​generation, which is why these brands’ involvement in it has been more serious this year. There’s so much hostility in the air that people are now quick to assume that wonky visuals are the work of AI, even if sloppy editing work is to blame.

One of the most star-studded Super Bowl commercials was Jurassic Park-Titled advertisement Comcast’s Xfinity network digitally shortened the lives of Sam Neil, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum. While people have noted across social media that “questionable anti-aging computer-generated imagery (CGI)”Looks like a slither AI“, “Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and Lola VFX Indeed credit To create the visual effects – the latter of which has been digitally de-aging actors for years in films such as X-Men: The Last Standand The Strange Case of Benjamin Button.

Dunkin’s advertising spot belied the same speculation regarding the use of artificial intelligence. the “Goodwill Dunkin’“A commercial featured low-life versions of Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc and other stars parodying a ’90s sitcom, but the strangely smooth skin and unnatural facial movements have divided opinion online on whether AI has been used to slim down actors’ looks for three decades. Sure, the ad went viral because people are playing ‘spot the AI-powered Super Bowl ads,’ but none of those conversations were about coffee or pastries.

There is usually some machine learning involved in creating computer-generated effects, but these are usually embedded with creative software editing tools rather than the text-to-video models now associated with AI videos. (We reached out to Dunkin’, ILM, and Lola VFX to inquire about the tools used to create the Xfinity and Dunkin’ ads.)

The use of artificial intelligence has also made its way into competitions between companies, as we have seen with Super Bowl ad for Pepsi Zero Sugar. The commercial, set to Queen’s song “I Want to Break Free,” features a CGI polar bear (traditionally a Coca-Cola mascot) having a crisis over preferring Pepsi in a blind taste test. The letter ends with the message that consumers “deserve taste” – perhaps a criticism of the controversial Coca-Cola product Holiday ads generated by artificial intelligence. In a statement to AdWeekPepsi’s vice president of marketing, Gustavo Reyna, said it was important to have a human touch in the ad. “If there’s one thing we care about and believe in, it’s the craft and creativity of our employees, talent and partners,” Rina said. Even if this is meant to be understood that unlike Coca-Cola, Pepsi does not use artificial intelligence, it is suspect by association because of the phrase “animals that do strange things” that was clumsily implanted by Artlist.

This latest batch of AI announcements aims, in part, to normalize the technology through attack. But the goal of a truly effective Super Bowl ad is to create a positive, exciting cultural moment to associate with your product. Instead, the ads left people wondering: Is it artificial intelligence? Does it sound like artificial intelligence? Does it matter anymore?