It seems like a statement from The Sweetshop, who made the ad, has also been pulled.
This piece links to a Futurism article[0], which in turn links to "an incredibly defensive statement"[1] from the ad agency.
> “For seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club [our in-house AI engine] working in lockstep with the directors,” Sweetshop’s CEO wrote.
(Sounds more like sweatshop than sweetshop, but I digress.)
However, that "defensive statement" link is broken, and I see no sign of it on the linked site, but I did find this older lamentation[2] from The Sweetshop regarding AI, or more specifically regarding the attitude that AI should allow you to cut costs and fire people.
> Being asked to cut 20–30% of creative costs and labour under the banner of ‘AI’ is unimaginative at best, and corrosive at worst. It drains the value of human creativity and concentrates it in fewer and fewer hands, hollowing out the very industry it claims to improve.
[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/mcdonalds-ai-ge...
[1] https://lbbonline.com/news/melanie-bridge-sweetshop-the-gard... (missing page, and the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy)
[2] https://lbbonline.com/news/Damn-The-Race-to-the-Bottom-AI-Sh...
Seems like one could have created a cheaper, higher quality ad with real actors.
Of course, real actors have unions and part of the point of AI is to make labor weaker.
As I see it, the purpose of AI is the same as the purpose of every technology ever since the hand axe - to reduce labor. Humans have a strong drive to figure out ways to achieve more with less effort.
Obviously there are higher order effects, but same as we wouldn't expect the Homo Erectus to stop playing with stone tools because they'd disrupt their society (which of course they did), I don't understand why we should decide to halt technological progress now.
I'm not sure what from my comment suggested pausing technological progress, unless you assume technical progress can only be achieved by exploiting workers. While that is happening, I don't think this it is a requirement.
What we see happening in the workforce with AI isn't reducing labor. We see firms making fewer workers do more work and laying off the rest, as in this case, where workers are talking about "hardly sleeping". Similarly, in my org, workers aren't expected to do any less work since adopting AI tools. This case suggests quality is down as well, but maybe that's subjective.
I don't see any evidence of worker exploitation being caused in any even semi-direct way by AI integration. In the field of animation and VFX in particular, while I've never worked in that area myself, essentially everyone I've heard talk about it over decades has mentioned unbearable crunch being routine.
You mentioned earlier that AI makes labor weaker, but I really don't see a case for it. If anything, given how relatively cheap GenAI is, it should allow most anyone with artistic sensibilities and skill in the area who is willing to leverage it to go into business themselves with minimal capital. Why should GenAI give power to employers, especially if they're just paying another company for the AI models?
I mean, we're watching the world try to figure out how to use a new set of tools. As with so many disruptive technologies, the initial stages of development appear to be drop in quality and inferior to the status quo. That usually reverses within five to ten years.
That said, I agree with you that AI is not going to lead to people doing less work, in the same way that computers didn't lead to people doing less work.
The non-technical folks don't understand the very real limitations, hallucinations, and security risks that LLMs introduce into workflows. Tech CEOs and leadership are shoving it down everyone's throats without understanding it. Google/Microsoft are shoving it down everyone's' throats without asking, and with all the layoffs that have happened? People are understandably rejecting it.
The entire premise is also CURRENTLY built around copyrighted infringement, which makes any material produced by an LLM questionable legally. Unless the provider you are using has a clause saying they will pay for all your legal bills, you should NOT be using an LLM at work. This includes software development, btw. Until the legal issue is settled once and for all, any company using an LLM may risk becoming liable for copyright infringement. Possibly any individual depending on the setup.
My comment has been weirdly controversial, but I'm not sure why.
I get that LLMs have problems.
I was recently looking into the differences between a flash drive, an SSD, and an NVMe drive. Flash memory is one of the technologies I had in mind when I wrote my comment.
Flash has a bunch of problems. It can only be written over so many times before it dies. So it needs some kind of wear-leveling abstraction that abstracts over the actual storage space and provides a smaller, virtual storage space that is directed by a controller that knows to equally distribute writes over the actual storage, and avoid dead cells when they manifest.
NVMe extends that with a protocol that allows a very high queue depth that allows the controller to reorder instructions such that throughput can be maximized, making NVMe enabled drives more performant. Virtual address space + reordered operations = successful HDD replacement.
My point here is that LLMs are young, and that we're going to compose them into into larger workflows that allow for predictable results. But that composition, and trial and error, take time. We don't yet have the remedies necessary to make up for the weaknesses of LLMs. I think we will as we explore more, but the technology is still young.
As for copyright infringement, I think copyright has been broken for a long time. It is too brittle in its implementation. Google did essentially the same thing as OpenAI when they indexed webpages, but we all wrote it off as fair use because traffic was directed to the website (presumably to aggregate ad revenue). Now that traffic is diverted from the website, everyone has an issue with the crawling. That is not a principled argument, but rather an argument centered around "Do I get paid?". I think we need to be more honest with ourselves about what we actually believe.
This seems a bit like trying to replace stone axes with axes made out of pottery, though. Neolithic pottery, of course, had its uses, but didn't make for a good axe. This is clearly worse than actually doing the job properly in every conceivable way.
I'm not convinced that generative AI video will _ever_ hit the 'acceptable' threshold, at least with current tech. Fundamentally it lacks a world model, so you get all this nightmarish _wrongness_.
So let’s add a world model!
> As I see it, the purpose of AI is the same as the purpose of every technology ever since the hand axe - to reduce labor. Humans have a strong drive to figure out ways to achieve more with less effort.
Yes.
> Obviously there are higher order effects, but same as we wouldn't expect the Homo Erectus to stop playing with stone tools because they'd disrupt their society (which of course they did), I don't understand why we should decide to halt technological progress now.
The difference is the relationship of that technology to the individual/masses. When a Homo Erectus invented a tool, he and every member of his species (who learned of it) directly benefited from the technology, but with capitalism that link has been broken. Now Homo Sapiens can invent technologies that may greatly benefit a few, but will be broadly harmful to individuals. AI is likely one of those technologies, as its on the direct path to the elimination broad classes of jobs with no replacement.
This situation would be very different if we either had some kind of socialism or a far more egalitarian form of capitalism (e.g. with extremely diffuse and widespread ownership).
I think you might have an overly noble view of Homo Erectus. I believe that a fellow member of the species is at least as likely to get that hand axe smashed into their skull as they're likely to benefit from it.
you completely forgot to include the technologies invented to enslave, imprison and monitor labor. Back to the library you!
ps- include the technology built to kill the enemy-labor in large numbers. Start with the Atomic Bomb in Japan.. that saved a lot of labor, right?
Well, obviously it's not the most representative example, but yes, if a country intends to kill hundreds of thousands of people, then an atomic bomb is probably the most cost-effective way, even after accounting for R&D. Moreover, if the calculus is how to win the war with the lowest number of additional lives lost, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were quite likely significantly less deadly, even when comparing just against the expected number of Japanese civilian casualties from the alternative scenario of a Normandy-like invasion of Japan.
EDIT: It's worth saying that humans have been killing each other from the dawn of humanity. Studies on both present-day and historical tribal societies generally show a significantly higher homicide rate than what we're used to seeing in even our most dangerous cities and across our biggest wars.
A bit old, but extensive numbers - https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...
> if the calculus is how to win the war with the lowest number of additional lives lost, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were quite likely significantly less deadly
This is just US propaganda. These numbers come from the fact that the US was "anticipating" a ground invasion of Japan or vice versa.
Which, to be clear, was always a made-up alternative. By the time the atomic bomb was dropped, Japan had already tried to surrender multiple times, both to us and the soviets. The reality is we just wanted to drop an atomic bomb.
You are probably right that Japan were close to surrendering and had begun some signaling around it, particularly via the soviets, but my understanding is that they hadn't actually done that, and according to the sources I read, they absolutely weren't willing to unconditionally surrender and demilitarize before the bomb.
But I don't understand why you put the ground invasion plans in quotes - are you claiming that all the effort spent on Operation Downfall[0] was just a misdirection intended to fool everyone, including the high-ranking officers involved in the planning?
I don't think it was a misdirection, but I do think it was an obviously bad idea that should've never materialized, and it didn't. I'm arguing it wouldn't have materialized anyway, and if it did, it wouldn't have been necessary.
Things did work out for Japan in the long run, but I still believe a conditional surrender + no atomic bombs should have been the solution. The US was very greedy with its demands, and I think a large part of that is our history of militarism and our desire to use new weaponry. The atomic bomb was already made, and I think realistically we were just itching to use it.
How does this kind of work take 7 weeks for 10 people?
10 animators could hand-draw every frame of a 44 second ad in that time. They could spend an hour on each frame, completely trash and redo the entire commercial, take an extra week for meetings and rework, and still have time to spare.
Because they have to constantly pull the slot machine lever on the ai video generator. Never quite getting what they want with the word salad prompt.
The attempts by both this outfit and the one that did the Coke ad to walk the line of simultaneously touting what a labor saving device these models are while also trying desperately to make it seem like they did some actual work somewhere so they can also be respected as creatives is honestly hilarious.
Like I thought the whole point of these stupid things was that any John Q off the street could make awesome videos? If that's the case, then what in the utter hell is the point of a making of video featuring people playing at being creative?
Like I thought the whole point of these stupid things was that any John Q off the street could make awesome videos?
Have you played around with stuff like sora 2 or veo 3 or seen the work of regular John Q's who have? In general, the quality of marketing for AI tools is far better than the quality of AI-generated video. These tools are also kinda expensive for the average John Q off the street...
I also think most people greatly underestimate just how much creativity is required to make a good movie, or how hard it can be to direct.
Counterpoint: a blind monkey could have accidentally made a better commercial than this one by entering random letters into an AI prompt.
“For seven weeks, our blind monkeys hardly slept, banging away at the typewriter in an inspired rush to produce the best prompts for the next McDonald's ad."
The editors of the AI clips haven’t figured out yet that you can just train a second LLM to act as editor
They are the labor equivalent of the factory manager that is dutifully working for the bosses that are working to close the factory.
Complete tangent but “in lockstep” really seems to be doing the rounds again as corpo speak. It honestly annoys me but I can’t explain why - maybe because they’re not a military but an ad production company.
Having spent enough time with marketing and PR folks, I really wouldn't be surprised if this supposed backlash is overhyped as a way to get more people interested in seeing the ad.
If this was intentional PR, then someone wildly misread the room
Some marketers thrive on "bad PR." The Paul brothers and Tesla are good examples.
An old adage says, there is no such thing as "bad PR".
The old adage is dumb, of course there is bad PR, that’s why people hire PR firms to begin with
they want more people to see it so they removed it from YouTube?
Outrage and clickbait has more than one form and it works surprisingly well on masses, part of orange mans success story. Just look at us discussing it, it wouldn't happen with (much more costly) normal MCD ad.
It is hard to buy this type of mass coverage along with:
"Wow McDonald's they really have a moral compass and listen to the people!"
If I was cynical marketer I would say make a couple of copies. And then pull it from your channel. Then spread those on social media.
If I was a cynical troll I would generate something ghastly, spread it on social media, and claim it was from McDonalds.
they probably understand it’s impossible (or very hard) to fully delete viral content and that it’d get re-shared
PLUS they double dip as they get extra search traffic for their brand from people trying to find the video
the forbidden fruit is more enticing
I've encountered far too many people who actively seek out ads or look forward to them, people I usually respect, its baffling.
It worked
It’s just a bad ad. People don’t want to hear a multinational corporation singing about Christmas being shitty. Whatever ad company made this should be forced to work retail during the season.
It's a bad ad and the AI just makes it worse. The song doesn't rhyme well, the lyrics doesn't make much sense (they feel very forced), the things they portray are mostly unrealistic/exaggerated, and the cherry on top is that McDonalds is somehow a respite from the chaos of Christmas. I've never once in my life thought of McD as somewhere comforting to go. It's just a bad ad period.
Also, no one wants a bad (probably also AI-generated) song about how terrible Christmas is. I'm not saying it's not terrible but no one wants a song about it.
It might be comforting in Europe sometimes. Some standalone McDonalds in Poland are very nice and comfortable.
> As quoted in Futurism, she said the production process took "seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes - then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production".
This isn't really a field where you get points for effort. The end product was extremely bad, which is ultimately what matters.
McDonald's championing the labour theory of value is a new one.
OMG! The song is literally called "The Most Terrible Time of the Year"!
They managed to say something disheartening to everyone on Earth except first-act Scrooges and Grinches. Doubt Ebenezier ever set foot in a McDonald's, and Grinch never left his mountaintop home, so... [Yes, I know not everyone celebrates Christmas, but that song title is just a massive dump on your day, regardless.]
What's their next marketing step? "Everything causes cancer, so you might as well get it from McDonald's!"
The song title basically ensured the audience would bounce before the uncanny eyeballs even appeared
On top of it being visually unappealing, I hate ads that take the misanthrope route to appeal to people’s worst nature. Wow, you hate Christmas, thanks McD.
As much as I hate McDonalds and think they should go bankrupt, and as much as I hate ads in general, I enjoyed this one. It's funny, it has lots of small clips of things going wrong one after the other. Compared to the standard corporate ads with a long family- and Jesus-oriented message that pretend to give some significance to Christmas besides how it affects their profits, this one is bold and different.
Who cares if it's made by AI and has obvious mistakes? It's not the new Star Wars movie where it's expected to focus on VFX issues. It's an ad - a 30 second clip that will run for a while to get people to buy products. If you can make an ad with AI for less money, why do it without AI?
As for the message - we need more of this. It's kind of a taboo to hate Christmas, but I loathe it and everything about it. And so do many people. Maybe they won't say that in the office or around religious family members, but we do exist.
You can't escape the shitty Christmas jingles that start in late November in almost all stores. You can't escape The tacky decorations, especially the blinking lights. If you mention the wasteful spending of taxpayer money on city decorations, people look at you as if you're crazy. You have to fight the implied obligation to participate in the celebration and to exchange gifts; having to tell people not to buy me anything. And the religious aspect of it, even though it started as a pagan holiday - people showing off how Christian they are even though a lot of them only remember their faith in twice a year. And finally, the commercialization of it - corporations pretending to care about it while trying to make everyone buy more products...
> Who cares
I think this sums up the feeling about this new era. Indeed, who cares?
Empathy is the biggest sin according to our new elites.
By the end of the day when you don’t care enough, you may finally start enjoying this AI slop.
Empathy towards what, in this case?
Each other.
Christmas is a holiday of the family, especially if you reject the consumerist overtones. It's — for me — a lovely week of spending time together, eating too much, and watching bad old movies.
I really like everything about that atmosphere, so the McDonald's ad felt shitty, heartless, and cynical. Why bother making the holidays better for others, just come to McDo!
> It's an ad - a 30 second clip that will run for a while to get people to buy products. If you can make an ad with AI for less money, why do it without AI?
> Who cares
If it has mistakes and is overall a shitty ad I imagine it'll be less persuasive in getting people to buy the product. I have to imagine someone cares very much about that.
It's funny, but shitty in attitude. It makes a great viral parody. It does not sell hamburgers.
That poster of a duck with a sledgeghammer getting ready to "PRESS ANY KEY" made me laugh, but IBM didn't put it out.
And to your point about AI: yeah, irrelevant. The ad sucks regardless.
> That poster of a duck with a sledgeghammer getting ready to "PRESS ANY KEY" made me laugh, but IBM didn't put it out.
I can't find anything; can you show us?
https://deadon.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/ask-tuffy-hit-any-ke...
It was a prehistoric meme in the day.
I agree it's not an effective ad for most people and will likely damage their brand. Shitty ad from a business perspective. One more reason to like it.
No way anyone wants to hang out at McDonald's. If they're trying to make McDonald's a third space they need to do some remodeling first. Restaurants aren't warm and appealing; they're hard and easy to clean.
The one near me is always full of old people just hanging out. They use it in a similar way to many kids with starbucks, but they speak to each other instead of using laptops.
Every McDonald's in North America I have been in had homeless people sleeping in it. I also actually worked at McDonald's and we would have to call ambulance every now and then because someone got high and passed out or something in the washroom.
Then you've probably only been to/worked at McDonald's in the built-up parts of major cities.
McDonald's in the suburbs and more rural areas and smaller cities are quite pleasant. Spacious, clean, just local folks.
If your local McDonald's has a homeless person problem, then all your local fast food franchises do. It's a social services problem, not a McDonald's problem.
Exactly my experience. I've been to a lot of McDonald's everywhere from rural to old inner city, and the difference is Stark. The more rural locations tend to be clean and relatively comfortable and enjoyable to be in. The inner city locations tend to be dirty, crowded, and generally not very pleasant to be in.
And it's not just McDonald's, as you mentioned. I've observed the exact same thing with Wendy's and many other restaurants as well.
There are of course plenty of exceptions. It's perfectly possible to find a dirty uncomfortable restaurant in a rural area, and it's also not difficult to find a nice comfortable place in the inner city. But generally speaking the above is what I have observed most
Thirding this observation. Inner city fast food has been - nearly universally - a horror show since at least 25 years ago when I first experienced it. I expect it will continue to be like that forever. I also suspect with them being allowed to take EBT (since maybe 10-15 years ago?), that provides enough revenue that they won’t pull out of those places completely.
I live in the suburbs, and it's not like this. The entire place smells like feet (???), all the tables are sticky, and there's a constant stream of "beep boop beep boop... bebebebeb"
I suspect you are full of it. I've been to lots of McDonald's locations, and I've rarely seen homeless people inside. Keep in mind I've been everywhere from California to Maine, From Kentucky to Florida to Texas. Nearly every state except the PNW, and I've never seen homeless people sleeping in a McDonald's (McD's used to be my goto with the $1 value menu when traveling). Ordering food? sure. As someone who once worked in fast food, I also know for a fact that management would kick them out, and so would the few dozen police officers in a lot of areas that walk in to get breakfast/coffee.
...Unless you mean Canada of course, however, I bet a well traveled Canadian would say the same thing.
Also, stop vilifying the homeless.
Nobody’s vilifying the homeless. Tons of homeless people are perfectly fine human beings who don’t bother anybody. Unhinged and dirty drug addicts on the other hand, are pretty categorically unpleasant. If you enjoy being around them, you can let them move in with you and then they won’t be homeless anymore.
As others have suggested, you have a narrowly scoped view of the world and the use of McDonalds in it. While my city slicking McDonalds trips are usually not great, for many it’s actually very good.
Photographer and author Chris Arnade has written fairly extensively of his travels around the “forgotten” parts of America, which frequently lands him in McDonald’s stores that do serve as a community third-space, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/08/mcdonalds-c...
I can't believe you'd bring up one article written nine years ago! "Narrowly scoped!" Give me a break, you know nothing about the scope of my travels. Please don't make assumptions and condescensions about people you don't know.
>No way anyone wants to hang out at McDonald's.
My anecdotal experience says they do. So what makes our observations different?
Yeah, it's tough to sell "gather here for warmth" when the chairs feel like they were engineered to speed-run customer turnover
Basically, "Clean with a hose" decor.
[flagged]
As bad as this is in conception and execution what I see is a blip on a path towards the new normal.
I've yet to see AI-generated video which _doesn't_ have this sort of problem; everything moves unnaturally and physics doesn't work properly. Unless it can shed that nightmarish quality, it's DOA, and it's not at all clear that it _can_, via current techniques.
I would actually wonder if AI generation of 3d models and movement instructions, coupled with a conventional physics engine, might be more viable, though it would obviously rule out attempts at photorealistic stuff.
Yep, they call them World Models. Here’s the cutting edge: https://www.worldlabs.ai/blog/marble-world-model
Google deepmind is working on one too.
This is going to end in an plague of video marketing material, the sort of professional looking creation that is too expensive currently to get wrong so the same advert is shown for months and sometimes repeated yearly.
Big brands are going to push multiple different adverts per week to a single market to see what sticks.
Get ready for the assault.
Perhaps. Watching my GenZ kids react to AI commercials during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, there was general revulsion. It seems many of them are seeking authenticity not uncanny. I know this would be an anathema in a board room where the cost of producing an amazing commercial via AI would make a C-suite sparkle with delight. No paid actors? No sound stage? No reshoots?
And yet, my kids reject it. It's odd. This is coming from a guy who loved watching frogs belch out the name of a beer company in the 90s....
If they can get to "normal". This was so uncanny valley and disjointed it was like a preview to a horror movie.
Feels like a trial balloon. Yes, this one went badly. It was awful slop. But there will be another. And another. And I feel like for most people catching an ad on TV, the realisation that AI made it will decrease or won't bother them over time. The frog will be boiled.
Those "trial balloons" happened years ago, this is only news because it was pulled and because it was a pretty bad advert anyway. Coca-cola had some backlash for its use of AI in adverts ages ago and carried on anyway.
There's tons of gen-AI in adverts and most of it isn't newsworthy. The frog is stewed.
What is especially bad about this ad? To me it seems no worse than the infernal Paintin Manning ad from last year or the State Farm Megan Trainor ad this year. If this was on rotation in NFL games it wouldn’t make me scramble for the mute button any faster than other ads.
I thought similarly to you, until I saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRie4vAvJ4
It almost seems intentionally AI? If anything, if my job at Maccas…ahem, McDonald's (sorry, spot the Aussie) is in marketing, I’d expect to to be promptly fired if this wasn’t expected to pass for anything less than satire.
Do you have children’s names for other restaurants?
Yeah, seeing it just once it looks like an ad with a terrible premise.
It certainly has an AI feel to it though, and I'm sure the more times you see it the more it falls apart.
On 1st watch the part that sticks out is the couple sitting by a window, who seem to be somehow sitting both inside AND outside at the same time.
I still cannot see the bad part
I am legitimately sorry
You have to turn your monitor on, silly!
Have you ever ridden a bike over a canal? The ad was pushed in front of a lot of people who have. I thought it was creepy throughout, but I can't believe they used that clip up front.
“a lot of people” - citation needed.
You realize it was a Dutch ad, correct?
Well, for a start it's a bad concept, but also the actual images are kinda nightmarish. The living teddy bear is particularly off-putting. And it's very obviously AI slop; physics is at best a mild suggestion.
I have taken it as a tongue in cheek reference to the current AI slop discussions, so like purposefully made sloppy. Appropriate joke? Apparently not, according to the masses. Well, just a matter of taste.
I mean, it's _possible_ they were aiming for "so bad it's good", missed, and ended up at just "really, really bad", I suppose. In practice, conscious attempts at "so bad it's good" virtually never work out; it is a thing which happens, not which is deliberately done.
The difference is that those ads were annoying on purpose
Why's it so mean spirited? I don't see that many ads, but the few I've seen lately are just insulting.
Apple intelligence: "why try to make an effort for others?" McDonalds germany: "Christmas sucks actually, but you know what doesn't?"
Great sample size of 2 I know... still enough to make me wonder if ad agencies are just playing a game of chicken between themselves to see who can spit on the face of customers the most before they realize they're being spit on.
McDonald's case is pretty funny, because their JP branch on social media is on a streak of well-received PR stunts where they just grab whoever made a popular song/meme over the years and pay them to redo it as an ad (+ releasing an original song for their moon-viewing line of product that I do enjoy).
Just watched it, the uncanny valley is a perfect match for their simulacra of food.
Who cares if it's AI made or not. It's funny even as it is offensive to many. One thing I've always wondered, with outrage over ads like this, would this (old) ad now be considered funny or offensive?
This is one of those moments that will look silly in the future.
The ad sucks because it's cynical and poorly made. People would have complained on this basis alone. The ad also sucks because current generative AI is mass plagiarism.
I am pretty sure all this nuance will be lost on people of the future though. Even right now video ads don't reach audiences like they used to. Maybe that will be another layer for people to fail to wrap their heads around and laugh about.
For some reason dutch advertising agencies went all-in on AI. There are tons of local commercials using the most terrible generated content and voiceovers.
How do you explain that an ad agency gets a contract from macdonalds and goes cheap on it? Is it greed or is it stupidity?
Consumers have a surprisingly good nose for when something was made to save time instead of to say something meaningful
Mickey D's disses Christmas.
Was the concept created by AI?
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRie4vAvJ4
Several of the scenes in here are extremely similar to one from a year or two ago, which I think was to the same song.
It's not only a bad use of AI, as it has been discussed in other comments here.
The entire idea of the ad is Grinch-worthy. It was conceived and directed by someone who hates the season. It makes you want to close the browser, not going out to eat.
What can I say, I thought it was funny. But seeing it over and over could get annoying.
I am as tired of AI slop as everyone else but I think the backlash to this is way too exaggerated. Commercials are already "slop." There is no expectation of quality at all. The average Christmas commercial involves a bunch of elves singing "Taking Care of Business" while dancing in front of office supplies.
This commercial sucked because nobody wants to hear "it's the most terrible time of year." I don't really care if they used AI.
I think this one was especially bad because a massive corporation can't be arsed to do better. Like, Apple exaggerates a lot on their advertising, but at least there's some heart to it. (Coming from someone that doesn't like Apple.)
Unless they do an ad where they literally crush creativity into a thin slab, an ad they had to later apologize for. Pepperage Farm remembers.
Yeah, that one must've looked super cool on paper. This McDo one can't have looked good anywhere but the price tag.
People care way too much about this.
Ads suck, in general. They're slop whether a human or an AI made it, and I don't want or care about them regardless.
So don't. But if mega corps want to juice our brains with their slop, to the degree that it's difficult to escape it, then we should also be able to sneer at the ads that miss the mark even more than usual.
You're foolishly giving them attention. Marketing teams know this.
If an ad is bad, it's better to ignore it and not write news articles about some marketing-fabricated controversy. Now you're thinking about McDonalds, which is what they wanted! They don't actually expect you to buy a burger tomorrow because of this.
Exactly. Most ads are cringy and rubbish. This concept could easily have been made with real actors and a VFX crew and been equally as shitty.
I find people complaining about bad ads odd. Do people want good ads? Do they want to be engaged as they're being sold Pepsi? I work hard to avoid ads, their quality isn't even a factor for me.
yes, ads actually being good would make them so much more tolerable, and maybe even watchable. there used to be a show that presented the worlds best ads of the year or something like that. it showed some awesome memorable ads
Nobody wants it, and we all have a sense of the dark future ahead. Why they think we would think this is an acceptable way to sell burgers is crazy.
P.T. Barnum once said, “There's no such thing as bad publicity”
a lot of folks talk about it, so, I am sure, somehwere some marketing guy is being congratulated
Never mind the AI aspect, the message "Christmas sucks so hang out at McDonald's over the holiday period" is wack
Weenies with no sense of humor. I found the ad hilarious, even though no ad on Earth could lure me to McDonald's.
It seems that when you’re selling fast food you’re in a world very far away from the one where livelihoods are being threatened by AI
Not if your customer base can't afford to eat your food because they lost their jobs to AI.
If the budget was USD10k it is actually good.
Other than the clips/scenes being short I couldn't tell too much that it was AI.
> As quoted in Futurism, she said the production process took "seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes - then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production".
How else are you going to justify what I assume is a 5-6 figure invoice for essentially doing nothing.
> "This wasn't an AI trick," she said. "It was a film."
Unfortunately you can't trick us with this nonsense. I am pretty sure no editing software was used beyond hammering on a prompt for a weekend.
>>This wasn't an AI trick," she said. "It was a film."
Even this statement reeks of chatGPT.
I must say, my first thought was ChatGPT's signature writing style coming through loud and clear in that statement.
Apparently the reason why chatGPT really likes the “it’s not just x, it’s y” structure is its overuse in marketing copy. Maybe this marketer actually has internalized that structure for real.
This is the slop that BBC failed to show you:
I've seen individual AI fans create these in minutes, hardly '"seven weeks" where the team "hardly slept" and created "thousands of takes"'.
The thing is, if you want AI output to be heavily directed, which is probably the case here, I can imagine that thousands of random takes had to be made to make the damn thing follow the director's imagination. If you don't care too much about the output you can make these very quickly, yeah.
Oh, that can also mean they were out partying using the ad budgets funds :D
That... doesn't bother me more than any other commercial.
Commercials are mostly dumb. This is another pretty dumb one. It has clunky AI just like plenty of other commercials have clunky traditional VFX.
Can't really see myself getting worked up about it?
If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that.
Don't get it either. LGTM. Sure, it's no high budget (pre-AI) Coca Cola Christmas Ad, but it's not disturbing or particularly bad. Feels like people are just jumping on the "AI ads bad" bandwagon.
> If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that.
There are way more people who want to be movie VFX artists then positions. Artists do commercials, because it pays that is where jobs are. They would gladly do cool movies.
> There are way more people who want to be movie VFX artists then positions.
Not good ones. Good VFX studios are actually a major blocker in movie production, because there aren't enough of them. And their only limit is the number of qualified artists available.
Really not. If the movie studios were willing to pay for that, there would be more studios.
We are talking about very competitive field where employers call all the shots. You know how you recognize lack of workers in an area? By high salaries, low competitiveness and very good working conditions.
> If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that.
This isn’t how it works. Excel didn’t free up bookkeepers to become CFOs. Digital photography didn’t free up photo lab technicians to become cinematographers.
The person who in 1970 would have been an accountant at Ford Motor Company with a pension and a mortgage is now, displaced by Excel, working at two burger joints to make ends meet, with no realistic path to anything better. The VFX artists will follow in the exact same footsteps. The shareholders will keep the difference, as they have time and again.
> This isn’t how it works.
It absolutely is how it works. You've got your economics wrong.
Your analogies are wrong because you're talking about people getting massive promotions.
I'm talking about doing the exact same job, just for a different type of company.
Also, you realize that accountants still exist and it's a well-paying job? They just use Excel now. They're not "working at two burger joints".
> If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that.
If they've run out of bread, let them eat cake.
> If they've run out of bread, let them eat cake.
Genuinely don't know what you're talking about.
There's massive demand in Hollywood for good VFX people. It's not some luxury job or something...?
There's demand for VFX artists like there's demand for video game developers; so many people want to do it that it drives wages down and there's demand for even cheaper labor. Nobody dreams of making TV commercials, movies are what people want to make.
Yes there are so many people that want to do it. Unfortunately, they're mostly junior-level. There continues to be a real shortage of senior-level VFX talent.
Okay, so the junior VFX guys who could only get jobs making commercials should, now that there is less demand for them to make commercials, go make movies instead? Make it make sense.
Why are you assuming it's the junior VFX guys making commercials? Commercials have big budgets too.
It's the same studios. They do work both for Hollywood and ad agencies.
But if ad agencies decide they're happier with lower-quality AI for 5% of the price (whereas they weren't if junior artists were still 50% of the price), while movie producers are not, then yes. They can make movies instead.
Does that "make sense" enough for you...?
Okay, so the senior VFX artist who has the experience to get a job in the movie industry if he wants it, instead gets a job in the commercial industry because the pay is better or maybe he just prefers it, now has to work in the movie industry contrary to his preferences.
No matter which way you slice it, you're not doing anybody a favor by eliminating their job. People generally already work the best job they can manage to and by eliminating that job you're making them pick another job they otherwise wouldn't have picked, or worse and more often, leaving them without a job because they were already working in the best job they were qualified for.
The whole "now that these jobs have been eliminated, the former workers are free to find a new job!" thing is bullshit cope. Always has been. They were already free to chose another job, and chose the one you think you're 'freeing' them from. You're not giving them choice, you're taking it from them.
There's a reason nearly all of the old guard VFX studios were driven to bankruptcy over the last decade and it doesn't have anything to do with massive demand for talent.
Yes, the reason was massive underbidding and fixed-bid contracts that would overrun. In other words, mismanagement.
There still aren't enough senior-level VFX artists in a Hollywood. It continues to be a blocker.
This is worse than what the average college kid can do over a weekend. What garbage.
Holy shit that's awful.
but cheap
The agency said they spent over 5000 hours just in the execution.
I haven't watched it but I'm sure they also either said or implied McDonalds is worthwhile on some level so we can pump the brakes on taking them at their word.
Is there any doubt that the agency is lying?
No. Advertising is all lies, so by any system of logic, as agencies are habitual, consistent liars.
There's a link to the ad in the article (the linked text "The Advert"). It is, indeed, astonishingly bad, even for AI slop.
Beyond the critique of the AI slop, what a rotten message that was. If their goal was to bum me out, they were successful.
If an RNG god exists, it will manifest soon, thanks to genAI, lol.
McSlop
What is the actual complaint here? Are people demanding commercials be beautiful? Before being AI slop, it is marketing slop. Why are they demanding 'soul' from an ad in 2025? Everything in this late-stage capitalist landscape is slop. They could have filmed it with real actors (or just reprised a spot from 15 years ago) and it wouldn't make any difference.
Because it's the TV yelling at you something along the lines of "Hey look, we replaced the creativity of dozens of people with this shitty result from a prompt, your job is next."
The fact that it's so bad that it obviously doesn't adhere to any sort of quality standards we expect from humans is just adding an insult to injury. It tells people "AI doesn't even need to be better at your job than you to replace you."
AI never needed to be better, it only needs to be cheaper.
Companies generally want their ads to not be horribly off-putting.
> They could have filmed it with real actors (or just reprised a spot from 15 years ago) and it wouldn't make any difference.
I mean, it was conceptually bad to start with, but also it has a lot of unsettling AI video stuff (in particular, broken physics) that you wouldn't get with a real ad.
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Executive dysfunction