“Coca-Cola’s AI ad just ruined Christmas… again” rages tech blog CB (Creative Bloq) Wow. A Coca-Cola by-the-numbers holiday ad lasting a bit more than 60 seconds ruined Christmas just like the Grinch or Mr. Potter. How is that possible?
It isn’t, but apparently the new tool of artificial intelligence which can create things like the Coke ad faster and cheaper than CGI has some folks losing their jingle bells. What’s going on here?
This: the Marxists and progressives on social media and elsewhere are upset because AI puts actors out of work, or soon will. Of course, except for Santa, there are no humans in the ad to be put out of work, but the critics on X and elsewhere aren’t fooled. Coke used cute animals, see, so people would be fooled into thinking that AI wasn’t taking away human jobs. “Firstly, can you really put aside the issues of AI generated creative displacing artists simply by using animals instead of humans?,” Fergus McCallum, CEO at TBWA\MCR wonders. “Even if you can, there’s no getting away from the lack of joy and authenticity. As audiences start to turn away from the AI slop being served to them on a daily basis, Coca-Cola are in danger of becoming inauthentic too. Whatever happened to ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’?!”
Well, all of those hippie singers are in rest homes or dead, I assume. There was also nothing authentic about a bunch of people singing about buying the world a Coke. Who sings about soft drinks, except in commercials?
“Fun fact: Coca-Cola is red because it’s made from the blood of out-of-work artists,” one critic bitches on X. Others are complaining about trivia, like penguins being out-of-place in a Christmas ad when Santa lives at the North Pole and penguins hang out on the other end of the globe. Oh, we’re supposed to be upset about geographically misplaced birds being unrealistic in an ad where Santa Claus appears? Some websites have even gone through the ad frame by frame (or whatever you’d call it now) to find “errors.”
OK, Marlon, you’re up!
To the Perpetually Furious Left, everything is political, nothing can be enjoyed for its own sake, corporations are evil and Workers of the World need to unite! They are the ones who try to ruin Christmas pretty much every year, with their “Happy Holidays!” edict and insistence that every manger scene have a Kwanza bush or whatever it is nearby.
I like the Coke ad. The colors are bright, the animals are cute, the polar bears make an appearance and there are otters and puppies, plus a sloth. Even if I didn’t like it, I don’t see how it could ruin Christmas. As for AI, its like an annoying toddler right now, but it’s growing, and it will effect all aspects of our society, especially the visual arts. Get used to it, or sound like the people who swore that the Model A was just a passing fad. Getting angry at an AI ad today is like complaining about the quality of acting in a third grade Christmas pageant.
Meanwhile, this post has made me thirsty. I think I’ll open a cold can of Coke!
Ethics Alarms 
I sometimes wonder if some people need something to be angry at in order to feel alive. I can’t imagine being in a perpetual rage.
AI has ruined Facebook (to the extent it wasn’t ruined before). Almost every post that isn’t written by someone you personally know is a recycled fun fact skimped from Wikipedia by AI, with an AI generated image to “illustrate”. For instance, for a post about the famous pneumatic subway illegally dug under NYC in the late 1800’s before the current subway still in existence, the “illustration” showed fish in the trackway of the “lavishly decorated” station. The sandwich shop had real archival imagery of the peumatic subway long in the public domain on their wallpaper decades ago, but we get fish in the trackways because everything is AI generated slop.
I also had learn about the heartwarming story of gorillas domesticating penguins in somewhere in southern Africa, or the gorilla that tore through a Poacher’s campsite looking for its captured off spring, all AI generated hoaxes or hallucinations. All these posts get thousands of likes, possibly from AI generated accounts. If AI is the wave of the future, then it will be a very bleak future indeed unless people refuse to engage with crap content.
AI only works with human curation. People rejecting utter crap is the only way AI could make a potentially beneficial impact. AI has no independent judgement. It is just statics, and generates content statistically similar to pre-existing content. Most content is currently human-generated low quality crap, so AI puts out similar low quality crap. As the percentage of AI content increases relative to the total content, AI will start inbreeding regurgitating in a death spiral increasingly flawed nonsense. At the rate we’re going, SkyNet will kill itself with coding errors long before it can terminate humanity.
Insisting even trivial content such as Coca-Cola commercials be subject to strict human editing is basically essential to human survival. No different than insisting medieval period pieces not show stray Starbucks cups in the background or refusing to buy tacos from companies cashing in on 6-7, or refusing to ship your pants with certain curriers.
Watching this Coca Cola ad in particular, it appears to be the type of human-edited ad we need, rather than the abject slop we usually get.
The crying about displaced artists fails to admit their craft is not valued.
As I tell my daughter who has a unteachable ability to render images in any medium she gets her hands on. “You will be paying for education after high school. If you study art you will be in debt and starving the rest of your life. If you study STEM which you are also good at, you can do art in your free time.”
I also warn my children that other than theft and deception there are only 3 way to grow an economy: dig something out of the ground, manufacture something out of something that was dug out of the ground, increase efficiency an order of magnitude.
Getting past the intrinsic barrier of LLMs presents an opportunity to increase our efficiency but a whole lot of people are going to fall off the efficiency cliff in the process.
The soundtrack is unnerving.
Do these Marxist express any concern for white, male television spokespersons or commercial actor having been put out of work?
History is a long list of technology “democratizing” everything.
Farming democratized food from the hands of a violent hunting elite.
Literacy democratized knowledge from the hands of a scribal elite.
With the printing press acted as an accelerant.
Fossil fuel energy democratized production and took ownership of wealth generating opportunities out of the hands of landowning elites.
The gun democratized society as it put into the hands of everyone the final say in political and judicial equality
AI is going to democratize just about *everything* that still hides behind gatekeeping professionals.
So?
Nah, actors aren’t going to go out of work. Elite actors and elite acting-gatekeepers are going to go out of work unless they lower their personal prices.
So?
“As audiences start to turn away from the AI slop being served to them on a daily basis, Coca-Cola are in danger of becoming inauthentic too.”
That sounds dangerously close to having faith in the invisible hand of the free market. I think Fergus McCallum needs to report for reeducation.
I have many complaints about AI. This Coke commercial isn’t one of them.
Succinct and well reasoned.
Programs designed to generate text, images, animation are nothing more than tools. They can be used well, or they can be used poorly. Most hatred for these tools’ existence comes from a lack of understanding and overly aggressive marketing. These programs never should have been called AI. There’s nothing wrong with calling out improper uses of computer generating programs, but it’s people that decide to use these tools in unethical or irresponsible ways, not the existence of the tools themselves.