And no one wants this shit
Screenshot via YouTube
Continuing our series on companies that offer AI slop and profits over human creation, we have a second time offender. Coca-Cola once again replaced the human element of their holiday commercial with AI slop. It looks terrible and celebrates the holidays by putting people out of work. Now this is the real “War on Christmas” Fox News should be yammering about!
Coca-Cola debuted their new holiday ad earlier this month and, despite pushback to last year’s soulless uncanny valley monstrosity, decided to reduce human involvement as much as possible once again. The end result has all the telltale signs of AI, including nonsensical elements, inconsistencies between scenes, strange, soulless animations, jittering, and all the hallmarks of a company that chooses profits over humanity.
Hey, at least the corporations are finally being honest about what they really care about. If they could remain profitable with no humans left on the planet, they’d wipe us out faster than AI could generate a video of a heartbeat.
Soulless, Malicious, and Just Plain Wrong
Quick, how many wheels does an 18-wheeler have? Don’t overthink this. If you had to draw an 18-wheeler’s side profile from memory, what might it look like? Here’s my attempt:
I… I’m sorry, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it. I swear I’m not a toddler.
Not… great, but at least I can count, right? Anyway, here’s Coke’s attempts:
Screenshots via Coca-Cola on YouTube. Note how the wheel locations would never work
Yeah, they just couldn’t get that right, could they? In fact, if you check out Dino Burbridge’s graphic on this Business Insider article, which shows every configuration of wheels Coke showed off for their “18-wheelers.” Most wouldn’t even be able to drive, let along have the number of wheels their namesake implies.
What this Coke ad comes off to me as is something made for dementia patents, or perhaps someone who isn’t even in the room and will just hear the jingle from the bathroom while their mandatory 1.5 minutes of commercials in the cheap tier of Hulu stream in the living room. It’s not realistic, it doesn’t look artistic, it looks awful, and the closer you look, the worse it looks. Perhaps it’s an ad for the age of the second screen. Why put effort into anything when really all you need is the jingle playing with a Coca-Cola logo on the screen? But at that point, why waste what little money they spent on this shitty AI-generated ad in the first place? Just put a Coke logo on the screen, maybe with Christmas lights around the edges of the display, and play the jingle. The brain rotted people and coma patients Coke is apparently advertising to won’t notice the difference anyway, right? Why bother drawing all the cute animals whose environments you’re destroying with AI when colors and flashing lights would be enough?
Coke Tried to Claim this Took Effort
In a “behind the scenes” video that sounds like it may be an AI voiceover, Coke shows off how the people using their AI tools chose which overly sharp knockoff Zootopia character should be in each shot. They claim they went through “pixel by pixel,” but the mistakes here are ones no human would make. It seems the bulk of their job was likely making sure the Coke branding was correct, because they certainly weren’t in charge of doing things like counting the wheels on trucks_ or otherwise cleaning up this slop. Even with that, in a few situations, the logo doesn’t quite look right either. Who okayed this? I suppose making it right would entail paying people, and why would Coke want to do that?
Coke was able to get this slop out using just 5 people working on the ad for 30 days. Of course, the holiday ad always comes out around the same time of year, giving them months to work, and Coke is one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world, so surely they could hire more than 5 people. Instead, we get slop made by Google’s generative AI, with just 5 people overseeing it, and it just make speople hate the brand more.
We Have to Put a Stop to This
People don’t seem concerned enough by the job loss, massive waste of resources, unethical sourcing of AI content, pollution, and destruction of our planet and ways of life that go into an ad like this. Coca-Cola did this last year, and sadly, we didn’t have a massive boycott of Coke. It’s possible people didn’t engage in a boycott because they simply assumed that the negative feedback Coke received last time would be enough to prevent them from doing it again. However, that doesn’t seem the case. Perhaps a larger backlash this year could change Coke’s ad for next year. On YouTube, the video is ratio’d, with more people upvoting comments that are critical of the ad than the ad itself. The same is true of Coca-Cola’s other AI content. People hate this slop, and we have to stand up to companies before they lay off more people, cause more job loss, and force this polluting garbage on us.
Real people lost their jobs for Coke to put out this slop. Happy holidays, from the soulless, greedy bastards at Coke. I’m going to go grab a Mountain Dew Baja Blast, the best soda ever.