Coke recently lazily posted an AI advertisement, which was promptly met with boos online. Having learned nothing from all that, McDonald’s decided it was its turn to turn out some AI garbage that nobody likes. And it went about as well as you think it did.
The ad was universally disliked, and the comments beneath it were quickly filled with people expressing how much they hated it. Eventually, the video’s comments were turned off, and it was removed shortly thereafter.
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Someone managed to save it and hosted it online. You can watch it below. What’s most striking about it is the eerie spine-tingling creepiness of the uncanny valley in the opening second of a 45-second video. That feeling only intensified as it went on.
McDonald’s Released an AI-Made Ad—and Then Quickly Pulled It
More than any other AI footage I’ve ever seen, this McDonald’s added in particular made me realize that I have my own built-in Spidey sense for AI slop videos. Still, instead of Peter Parker’s tingling feeling, I get a looming sense of anxiety and dread. Like the humanoid beasts on-screen may leap out and try to hurt me at any moment.
Unquestionably, the most offensive part of it all is that real flesh and blood human beings could have done every single thing in the ad. Still, McDonald’s Netherlands, which created it with the help of ad agency TBWA\Neboko, chose to pay as few humans as possible to generate some garbage that could really have used some humans in it if they wanted anyone to be endeared to it.
The ad itself plays on the premise that the holidays are “the most terrible time of the year,” then proceeds to prove it by pelting viewers with a blur of rapidly mutating AI scenes depicting a world in which humans and inanimate objects alike are made of rubber.
The Sweetshop, the production company responsible for this festive Franken-film, responded with a defensive statement that has seemingly been pulled. You can read it here, on 9Gag, of all places.
They insisted it wasn’t “an AI trick” but “a film,” stressing that their crew spent seven sleepless weeks massaging hallucinated footage into something “genuinely cinematic.” In other words, they spent some time typing prompts to make something everyone hates when we should be ba-da-bababa lovin’ it.
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