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Coca-Cola has released a series of AI-generated Christmas ads that sparked mockery and disgust from social media users.
AI-generated video has been slowly making its way into advertising, with the latest AI models capable of creating short clips of footage that, at a glance, can pass for the real thing.
Last June, Toys “R” Us experimented with an AI-generated ad that featured uncanny imagery, sparking backlash on social media.
Now, Coca Cola has released three short AI-generated ads that have prompted 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 production.
Interestingly, these new AI-generated ads highlight the weaknesses and hard limitations of the current wave of video-generation models.
Generating human beings without creating grotesque distortions, eerie facial expressions and unnatural movements is hugely challenging for AI.
Secret Level Founder Jason Zada spoke to Ad Age about the production process behind the Coca-Cola ads, and explained that Kling was helpful in making the human motion “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 have furry animals).
The ad is more cautious and less complex than the Toys R’ Us ad, a quick montage of very short clips, focusing 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 Happens 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’s ads did help popularize the color scheme).
Like the 90’s Christmas ad, the new, AI-generated version features red delivery trucks decked out with Christmas lights and pictures of Santa Claus, with two shots of smiling customers, one clutching a bottle of Coke.
Notably, these shots are incredibly fast—the ad seems in such a rush to get to the finish line that there’s barely any time to register what’s happening on screen.
Compared to the 90’s ad, the “people” featured in the ad don’t have much time to linger, because of the strong likelihood of igniting the uncanny valley.
It is telling that the face of Santa Claus never appears onscreen, only his swollen, rubbery hand, clutching a Coke bottle. One can only imagine the leering faces of Santa that the AI models generated—who needs the Nightmare Before Christmas when we have the fever dreams of AI?
Plenty of details are “off,” such as the truck wheels gliding across the ground without spinning in the establishing shot, and the distorted proportions as the trucks enter the city, with bystanders rendered so large that they would not be able to fit through the truck doors.
In the background, some of the Christmas lights and buildings have nonsensical shapes and patterns; these mistakes are subtle enough to glide past if the viewer isn’t paying close attention, but observant internet users quickly pointed out the errors, and poked fun at the ad.
One commentator wrote, “10 cuts in 15 seconds, never showing the same thing twice, still looks wrong. Truly a powerful technology.”
Interestingly, many of the shots are clearly touched up, as generative AI is unable to create video that contains coherent text, but there are Coca-Cola logos everywhere.
These shots represent the best efforts out of many attempts, with the models spitting out plenty of unusable footage that was discarded.
According to Zada, a simple opening shot featuring an AI-generated squirrel proved particularly tricky. “We must have run that squirrel [through AI] in the beginning of that video a couple hundred times,” Zada said.
As one commentator pointed out, this simply isn’t efficient. Using an energy intensive technology to spit out footage in the hope that some shots are usable, touching up the best examples, and being left with very short clips that are riddled with “hallucinations” seems like a poor outcome.
Many commentators who work in film and television were not impressed by the ad, and many dismissed the technology as a poor attempt to cheapen their labor and kill jobs.
Responding to the ad, Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch joked that Coca-Cola was red because it is made “from the blood of out-of-work artists.”
Megan Cruz of The Broad Perspective Pod wrote: “This is always what [AI] was going to be used for btw. It’s not some great equalizer. It’s a way for already massively wealthy execs to add a few more mil to their annual bonuses by cutting creative teams entirely & having a machine vomit up the most boring slop imaginable instead.”
Ironically, the ads do not successfully sell generative AI as a useful tool; the footage is a poor copy of a successful, human-crafted ad that has managed to remain memorable through the decades.
Generative AI doesn’t really “create”—it blends and remixes what has come before, creating glitchy, uncanny echoes of human art, while guzzling an astounding amount of water and electricity.
There’s a reason Santa’s workshop is depicted as a place where toys are crafted by hand—that’s how the magic happens.
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