Coca-Cola’s AI-generated Christmas ad receives backlash, company responds

Coca-Cola unveiled three artificial intelligence-generated Christmas ads in the US, but they faced backlash and ridicule. The ads suffered from common flaws in AI-generated content, including distorted visuals, unsettling facial expressions, unnatural movements, and disproportionate features, leaving viewers unimpressed, Forbes reported.

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Among the three, the one that got the most attention was the one paying homage to the iconic Coca-Cola Christmas ads from 1995, “Holidays Are Coming.”

This one features red delivery trucks with Christmas lights and pictures of Santa Claus, with two shots of smiling customers, one holding a bottle of Coke.

The problem was that the shots were incredibly fast, and the ad seemed to be in such a rush to get over that there was barely any time for the viewer to register what was going on.

One of the reasons why people reacted so negatively to the ad was that Coca-Cola in the US is closely associated with the festive spirit.

The report added that this is so much the case that Coca-Cola is often credited with creating Santa Claus’ red-and-white suit, which isn’t true, but that it did help popularize the color scheme.

Other issues include messy details like truck wheels gliding across the ground without spinning, distorted proportions, and nonsensical shapes of Christmas lights and buildings.

These new AI-made ads were created by three AI studios which were Secret Level, Silverside AI and Wild Card. They used the generative AI models Leonardo, Luma and Runway, with a new model, Kling, brought in towards the end of production.

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Coca-Cola instead of recognising this as a mistake, justified it by stating that it “remains dedicated to creating the highest level of work at the intersection of human creativity and technology,” to the New York Times.

“The Coca-Cola Company has celebrated a long history of capturing the magic of the holidays in content, film, events, and retail activations for decades around the globe,” the New York Times report quoted a spokesperson as saying. “We are always exploring new ways to connect with consumers and experiment with different approaches.”

Some dismissed the ads as a poor attempt to cheapen labor and kill jobs.

The Forbes report quoted Megan Cruz of The Broad Perspective Pod as writing, “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.”

Similarly, Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch was also quoted to have joked that Coca-Cola was red because it is made “from the blood of out-of-work artists.”

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