McDonald's removes AI-generated ad after backlash
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I was trying to sign up my step dad to SiriusXM (he wanted it) so I called their phone number. The first interaction with the company is them saying you are speaking to an AI and to ask what I'm trying to do. So I said something like "I'd like to sign up for a new account but have a question about the promotional price". It said it couldn't understand the request and I had to repeat things a few times until it gave up and sent me to a human where the question was resolved quickly but it took minutes to reach a human.
It's wild to me that companies are putting AI at the top of their sales funnel.
That's an example of a weird heuristic I frequently see applied to corporations: assume some awful decision is the result of some scarily hyper-competent design process, and construct a speculative explanation along those lines.
But must of us have worked in corporations, an know how stupid and incompetent they can be.
> Or, they just didn't study that. Or, the decision-makers don't contact customer support for themselves and so don't know how infuriatingly unhelpful AI ones are.
Occam's razor points to this as the reason.
The AI tools can produce the work, the quality can be good but taste is lost as the professionals are removed from the process.
There’s a quote I can’t remember the source of… “anyone can have an idea but not everyone can execute on it.” AI gives the illusion you can create your ideas and compete with actual professionals
It is, or used to be at least, one of the most creative visual industry too, because of relatively big budgets, short duration, fast release cycles.
I now see that is mainly targeting Creative Work, and it's really really sad.
I think we as humans find joy in creative work and it is frustrating that we as a collective decided that is the thing we will take away from humans.
Beautiful visuals, beautiful story telling, an actual message... ads can be more than "consume our shit"
Cringe. I suspect the same people who needed social comments and international media coverage to figure out that Christmas might actually be a nice time for some people are the ones who decided that video was appropriate in content and aesthetics. Also, that quote reads a bit like a machine desperately trying to understand humans.
It's lame but it works
It reminds me of Apple’s Crush! commercial: https://adage.com/video/crush-ipad-pro-apple/
If you don't know it can be better, you're fine with it. But when someone shows you the proper stuff, you can't stand the other shit.
I think we will look back at AI "slop" as a temporary point in time where people were creating bad content, and people were defending it as good even when it was not. Instead, as you say, AI video will fall into the background as a tool creators use, just like cameras or CGI. But in my opinion it won't be that people can't tell that AI was used at all. Rather, it will be that they won't care if there is still a creative vision behind it.
At least, that is what I hope compared to the outcome where there are no creators and people just watch Sora videos tailored to them all day.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art said it better than I ever could
These days, though, it's not as common as it used to be. Kimi K2, in particular, is a weirdly good and stylistically flexible writer.
How sad, what it does to us.
> “It’s never about replacing craft, it’s about expanding the toolbox. The vision, the taste, the leadership … that will always be human,” she said.
> “And here’s the part people don’t see: the hours that went into this job far exceeded a traditional shoot. Ten people, five weeks, full-time.”
That response sounds like it was written by ChatGPT, which is a fantastic piece of tone-deaf irony from the creators.