Coca Cola’s AI-generated ad controversy, explained

Coca-Cola has released a series of AI-generated Christmas ads that sparked mockery and disgust from social media users.

AI-generated video is slowly making its way into advertising, with the latest AI models capable of creating short clips of footage that can instantly pass for the real thing.

Last June, Toys “R” Us experimented with an AI-generated ad that featured creepy images, sparking backlash on social media.

Now Coca Cola has released three short AI-generated ads that have sparked a similar reaction.

How were the AI ​​Coca-Cola ads created?

Three AI studios (Secret Level, Silverside AI, and Wild Card) worked to create these ads using the generative AI models Leonardo, Luma, and Runway, with a new model, Kling, brought in near the end of the production.

Interestingly, these new AI-generated ads highlight the weaknesses and hard limitations of the current wave of video generation models.

Creating humans without creating grotesque distortions, creepy facial expressions and unnatural movements is hugely challenging for AI.

Secret Level founder Jason Zada ​​spoke with Advertisement Age about the production process behind the Coca-Cola ads, explaining that Kling was instrumental in making the human movement “more realistic.”

The Coca Cola AI-generated ad that attracted the most attention on social media is the only one that features any humans at all (the other two feature furry animals).

The ad is more careful and less complex than the Toys R’ Us ad, a quick montage of very short clips that focus mainly on vehicles and close-ups of smiling faces.

In short, it’s footage that isn’t too challenging for generative AI to produce.

What’s happening in Coca Cola’s AI-generated ad?

The AI-generated ad pays homage to the iconic Coca-Cola Christmas ads from 1995, “Holidays are coming.”

Coca-Cola is so closely associated with the festive spirit that the soda company is often credited with creating Santa’s red-and-white suit (this isn’t true, but Coca-Cola ads helped popularize the color scheme).

Like the 90s Christmas ad, the new AI-generated version features red vans decorated with Christmas lights and images of Santa Claus, with two images of smiling customers, one holding a bottle of Coke.

Notably, these images are incredibly fast-paced – the ad seems to be in such a hurry to get to the finish line that there’s hardly any time to register what’s happening on the screen.

Compared to the 90s ad, the “people” in the ad don’t have much time to hang around, due to the high probability of igniting the uncanny valley.

Tellingly, Santa’s face never appears on screen, only his swollen, rubbery hand clutching a Coke bottle. One can only imagine the smiling faces of Santa that the AI ​​models generated – who needs Nightmare before Christmas when we have the fever dreams of AI?

Lots of details are “off”, such as the truck’s wheels sliding across the ground without turning in the establishing shot, and the distorted proportions as the trucks drive into town, with spectators made so large they wouldn’t be able to to fit through truck doors.

In the background, some of the Christmas lights and buildings have nonsensical shapes and patterns; these errors are subtle enough to slip by if the viewer isn’t paying close attention, but observant internet users were quick to point out the errors and poke fun at the ad.

A commentator wrote“10 clips in 15 seconds, never showing the same thing twice, still looking wrong. Really powerful technology.”

Interestingly, many of the images are clearly edited, as generative AI is unable to create video that contains coherent text, but there are Coca-Cola logos everywhere.

These images represent the best effort out of many attempts where the models spit out lots of useless footage that was discarded.

According to Zada, a simple opening shot with an AI-generated squirrel proved particularly difficult. “We must have run that squirrel (through the AI) at the beginning of that video a few hundred times,” Zada ​​said.

As one commenter pointed out, this is quite simple is not effective. Using an energy-intensive technology to spit out footage in the hope that some images are usable, filling in the best examples and being left with very short clips filled with “hallucinations” seems like a poor result.

Many commentators who work in film and television were not impressed by the ad, with many dismissing the technology as a poor attempt to cheapen their labor and kill jobs.

In response to the ad, Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch joked that Coca-Cola was red because it was made “from the blood of out-of-work artists.”

Megan Cruz from Pod for the broad perspective wrote: “This is always what (AI) was supposed to be used for btw. It’s not a good equalizer. It’s a way for already massively wealthy executives to add a few million more to their annual bonuses by cutting creative teams entirely and having a machine churn out the most boring slop imaginable instead.”

Ironically, the ads don’t successfully sell generative AI as a useful tool; the footage is a poor copy of a successful, man-made ad that has managed to remain memorable over the decades.

Generative AI doesn’t really “create”—it mixes and remixes what’s come before, creating glitchy, uncanny echoes of human art as it siphons astonishing amounts of water and electricity.

There’s a reason why Santa’s workshop is depicted as a place where toys are made by hand – that’s how the magic happens.

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