Everyone who produced generative AI commercials for this year’s Super Bowl seems to have failed at making gene AI seem useful or something worth getting excited about. While we’ve seen plenty of AI-generated ads before (at previous Super Bowls, no less), this year’s event was oversaturated with them. That’s partly because image and video generation models have become somewhat more sophisticated in the past year – while still subpar compared to what humans produce, they’ve improved just enough that a number of brands can now be content to have their names associated with AI-derived footage.
It’s also much, much cheaper and faster to use an AI gene, which is convenient when the cost of 30-second commercial spots at this year’s Super Bowl ranges from $8 million to $10 million. With the traditionally produced commercials from previous Super Bowls, you could really see how spending money on production ultimately resulted in commercials that felt more premium than what you would typically see on television. But this year there was an undeniable cheap and sloppy quality to many of the ads. Here are some of them.
One of the worst examples was the Artlist ad. The main draw of the ad (which only aired in New York and Los Angeles) from Israeli creative firm Artlist is that anyone can create Super Bowl-worthy videos using the company’s set of production tools. It’s even bragging that Artlist only bought their Super Bowl space a week ago and spent five days producing a mother ad. That would be impressive if Artlist’s final product actually looked like something that would make average consumers want to use these tools.
Instead, the ad contains the very hallmarks that convinced people to see AI-generated video as stupid. Rather than say briefly, convincingly, cohesive story of any kind, the ad is just a series of very short clips of animals doing weird things, paired with a voice-over. There is nothing innovative about it. And given how much trouble the world already has, the whole thing feels more like a threat than a promise of good things to come.
Sazerac Company-owned vodka brand Svedka resurrected its old Fembot CGI character for its Super Bowl presence, giving her a new male sidekick named Brobot and placing a pair of androids in an ad that was almost an AI gene-created entity. Although Fembot used to be part of the larger Svedka brand and always looked… well, everything about the Brobot character feels like a rip-off. I, RobotThe character of Sonny, portrayed by Alan Tudyk in the 2004 film.
talk to The Hollywood Reporter Sara Saunders, Sazerac’s chief marketing officer, said before the Super Bowl that using artificial intelligence to create the ad didn’t actually save the company that much time or money. Rather, Sazerac felt that the AI aesthetic could be thematically resonant for the vodka brand, and the company believed that the ad could convey a message that “is ultimately pro-human”.
The story of the ad is pretty straightforward: Two robots show up at a club, pull vodka bottles out of their bodies and get drunk while standing in a crowd of awkwardly dancing AI-generated humans. We want to understand that alcohol helps machines relax in a very human way. But what stands out most about the ad is the way Brobot starts to short-circuit after swallowing the drink, which immediately starts spilling over the chassis, because the mouth of the machine is not connected to the internal system of pipes that are intended to process liquids.
Although Sazerac says Brobot’s glitch is intentional, it looks very similar to the crude random video output that AI models are known to generate without being specifically prompted. The sequence sounds like Brobot’s character breaking down by interacting with the Witness product, which isn’t exactly the kind of message alcohol companies lean on. Sazerac can try all they want to spin the Witness ad as a win that aligns with the vodka brand identity, but the most humane thing a company could do in this situation would be to hire more people to develop a better idea.
Clearly, we’re not alone in our feelings about gen AI’s less-than-polished manufacturing process, which made it even riskier for these brands to participate this year. There’s so much animosity in the air that people are now quick to assume that clunky visuals are generated by AI, even though sloppy editing work may be to blame.
One of the most star-studded Super Bowl commercials was a Jurassic Park– a themed ad for Comcast’s Xfinity network that digitally aged Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum. While people across social media have commented that the questionable CGI and de-aging “looks like AI bullshit”, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and Lola VFX are actually credited with creating the visual effects – the latter of which has been digitally aging actors in films such as X-Men: The Last Standand The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Dunkin’s commercial ran afoul of the same speculation about the use of AI. The “Good Will Dunkin’ ad featured older versions of Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc and other stars parodying the ’90s sitcom, but the strangely smoothed skin and unnatural facial movements divided opinion online over whether artificial intelligence had been used to shave off the actors’ looks for three decades. Sure, the ad went viral because people are playing “spot the AI Super Bowl ads,” but none of those conversations are about coffee or baked goods.
There is usually some machine learning involved in creating computer-generated effects, but these are usually built into the software’s creative editing tools, rather than the text-to-video models now associated with video AI. (We reached out to Dunkin’, ILM and Lola VFX to ask what tools were used to create the Xfinity and Dunkin’ commercials.)
The use of AI has also worked its way into rivalry between companies, as seen in the Super Bowl ad for Pepsi Zero Sugar. The ad, set to Queen’s “I Want to Break Free,” features a CGI polar bear (traditionally Coca-Cola’s mascot) having a crisis over favoring Pepsi in a blind taste test. It ends with the message that consumers “deserve a taste” — perhaps a jab at Coca-Cola’s controversial AI-generated holiday ads. In the statement to AdWeekPepsi vice president of marketing Gustavo Reyna said it’s important to have a human touch in advertising. “If there’s one thing we care about and believe in, it’s the craftsmanship and creativity of our people, our talent and our partners,” said Reyna. Even if it’s meant to mean that unlike Coca-Cola, Pepsi doesn’t use AI, it’s suspect because of the association of the “animals do weird things” trope that Artlist so carelessly cultivates.
This latest crop of gen AI hype has been aimed in part at normalizing the technology through the onslaught. But the point of a truly effective Super Bowl ad is to create a cultural moment that is positive and exciting to associate with your product. Instead, the ads made people wonder: Is it AI? Does it just look like AI? Does it still matter?