“Is AI going to put us out of business?” is a question we (half) joked about earlier this year, and based on the facts at hand, we settled on a confident “NO.” The takeaway Sam had landed on in that particular piece was: “AI can be a very useful tool to accomplish many tasks, but will it replace creativity? No.”
Ultimately, there hasn’t been any solid evidence AI could somehow be an alternative to good old-fashioned creative ingenuity. In fact, many will argue that AI is fairly useLESS without creative input at different levels, from writing content for learning models to feeding the creative examples you want to emulate. Creativity is the linchpin holding the hopes of AI’s future intact.
Finally, we have been gifted a real-world example of AI in action from a major industry player! Late last month, Coca-Cola felt confident enough to make a spectacle out of its newly released, AI-created Christmas ad. Check it out:
Now, if these ads are playing on a TV in the background and you aren’t really paying attention, you’d think nothing of it, right? They’re banal, Christmas-themed visuals soundtracked by a repetitive jingle and sleigh bells. On the surface, it looks like it would fit alongside any of the previous years’ polar bear themed ads.
The first spot above has a familiar Coca-Cola feel with a color palette of heavy reds, snowy-night blues and the yellow glow of tungsten light that screams “CHRISTMAS!!!” aesthetic.
But once you start analyzing the figures, something seems off. The animated animals find themselves somewhere between Pixar cartoon and realism, though better described with the dystopian “AI look.”
Looking closer, you can see the cracks begin to show:
If anything, it shows AI is not production ready yet, it's full of errors and does the opposite of giving feelings of "nostalgia" imho. pic.twitter.com/JQRGz7VdGJ
— Silfaster 🧡🦝 (@silfaster1) November 16, 2024
The iconic Coca-Cola trucks seem to forget their shape. They morph into full-on squares on the snowy highway, then double-decker buses in the city. These aren’t complicated animations for an animator or illustrator, yet the FINISHED product in this ad, which someone “generated,” someone watched, and someone approved, can’t get simple proportions right. (And let’s face it: this is several someones.) This is probably why the clips are edited the way they are, in the hopes you don’t notice just how goofy they look.
The effects are even scarier in the second spot where we introduce AI characters:
Coca Cola’s annual Christmas commercial has been created with AI this time. pic.twitter.com/xO72akwoBh
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) November 15, 2024
In this 15-second clip, we get a total of 10 different shots! It’s hard to imagine this is a deliberate attempt to hide the awkwardness: “you won’t recognize how bad it is if you don’t have time to focus on it.”
But it’s bad. The proportions are off, the movements are awkward, and you wonder if they spent 90% of the time training this ad to focus on hands; “Look! Look at all these five-fingered hands!” as if that is the true measure of success.
For what we know about AI, that seems accurate.
Setting aside the anomalies, the ads are objectively awkward. They’re unsettling in a way we’ve only known since the birth and forced-feeding of AI into our everyday lives. (Someone pointed out that, another easy tell for AI is the motion only moves in one direction, which is 100% the case in these spots and now that’s all I see.)
The “AI look” has become synonymous with “incorrect,” and it’s befuddling why so many companies are trying to “make AI happen” against all odds and better judgment.
Speaking of judgment: the ad is boring!
It’s devoid of anything resembling creativity and instead seems to be satisfied with being a computer-generated, trite approximation of what a creative team might come up with if they got the assignment at noon for a 5 o’clock deliverable.
“Coca-Cola will always remain dedicated to creating the highest level of work at the intersection of human creativity and technology,” was the response from Coca-Cola as to what motivated this uphill battle to “get[ting] technology to do the work people already do to a high degree.”
Maybe they should lean a little heavier on that “human creativity” part.
In the meantime, if you want a good commercial (that people aren’t going to make fun of because of how bad it is), we feel confident in our abilities to use modern technology to our creative advantage, rather than as a replacement for quality creative ingenuity.
