Coca-Cola’s new holiday ad turned me off of AI-generated art completely

I am so over AI-generated art. It just needs to go away. Please.

Like everyone, I was captivated by the tech as it emerged in 2022. As a novel technology, it was pretty mind-blowing. Type “Cat fighting in WW2” into a text-to-video generator, and in no time, you can get a clip of an American shorthair wielding an M1 Thompson submachine gun against Nazis.

A big draw of AI-generated art was that people without significant visual art skills, like me, could now whip up pretty interesting concepts without having to take the time to learn a talent or create the work. But unless you actually had a professional use case for creating AI-generated art and video, this draw quickly receded.

Many of us felt done with AI-generated art, but it was not done with us. Since the beginning of this year, AI-generated art has overrun my social media feeds, especially in apps centered around visuals, such as Instagram and TikTok.

I used to enjoy browsing Instagram’s Reels for short periods, watching clips of exotic world locations to add to my bucket travel list, the antics of funny cats and dogs, and videos about astronomy and history. Yet, in recent months, those videos have become fewer and far between. In their place is AI slop, the term given to the AI-generated content rapidly swarming our feeds.

Now instead of actual video and images, I see slop and more slop—and of some truly weird shit. There’s Shrimp Jesus and “countries as animals” (spoiler: Russia is an AI-generated bear, America is an eagle), and clips of children morphing into creepy creatures—the stuff of nightmares. And even when I am shown the traditional content I like—those astronomy videos and videos about history—the authentic images of the cosmos or from the front lines of WW2 have often been replaced with ones that are clearly AI-generated.

How do I know? Because the majority of AI-generated art tends to have the slop-sheen to it: It looks digitally airbrushed, like those bad mass-produced paintings you find at a thrift store that, at best, deserved to be hung on the backside of the door to the guest bathroom no one uses. Both try to convey reality but fail miserably at it. Or, as my colleague Mark Wilson has previously put it, AI-generated images “are as smooth as a Barbie doll, but like applying a beautifying filter to your face, they are paradoxically sharp and hazy at the same time; logical and senseless.”

In recent months, nothing has made me close a social media app more quickly than when the algorithm starts serving me these generic generative AI images and videos. It’s as if I’m in line at Instagram or TikTok’s cafeteria, and no matter how much I hate it, the cook continues to ladle not just the same slop but increasingly larger piles of it onto my plate.

So, leave the cafeteria, right? That’s what I’ve been doing. But increasingly, the AI slop has been spilling over from social media to traditional media.

Take, for example, Coca-Cola’s ">new Christmas ad, which the company released earlier this month. The ad is a remake of its iconic “Holidays Are Coming” ad from 1995, but it now features Coca-Cola Zero Sugar and a more diverse cast, as MarketingWeek noted. And it was generated exclusively by AI.

Yes, the ad has the same AI slop characteristics I’ve mentioned above: the digital airbrush aesthetic and that sense that it is inherently a false representation of reality. But this ad is much worse than that.

I have historically loved Coca-Cola’s holiday ads. Not only were they warm and cozy and full of anticipation for the holidays, but they showed an artistic mastery of craft. I mean, look at the opening shot of ">this Coca-Cola Christmas spot from just three years ago titled “Chimney.” That street would feel familiar to many Americans. It seemed real and identifiable.

But the ad’s directors didn’t just stumble upon that street one night and say, “Quick, let’s film the commercial here!” The “realism” of that snowy street was created by dozens of artisans—carpenters, set designers, electricians, prop masters, and other craftspersons. To me, the fact that a group of humans working in tandem can achieve something like that has a magic to it, heightening the ad’s power. And the magic these humans manufactured using their own neural synapses created wonder in mine. That’s what art does: it makes us marvel at the art and the artist.

But this AI-generated Coca-Cola ad? I did not marvel at it. Not once watching this ad did I think, “Wow! How did they replicate the look of small-town America so perfectly?” or “I wonder how many crew it took to make that Christmas tree look so beautiful?” or even “Geez, that actor really captured the joy of the season in his facial expression.” (Quite the contrary, the avatar of the “man” in the ad looked like someone placed a Coke in his hand, put a gun to his head, and told him to smile.)

The ad’s visuals were birthed from nothing by nothing: non-sentient digital code that does not know that it, or the holidays for that matter, exist. This ad had no power to make me wonder, because there was no humanity in it.

Why did Coca-Cola pivot to this AI slop fest this year? The company’s chief marketing officer for Europe, Javier Meza, told MarketingWeek, “We didn’t start by saying: ‘OK, we need to do this with AI.’ The brief was, we want to bring Holidays Are Coming into the present and then we explored AI as a solution to that.” He then noted that AI was an “efficient” way to remake the ad, saving money and time.

But it sure didn’t save the magic that used to infuse the company’s human-made ads.

I’m over generative AI art. And if Coca-Cola’s new spot is the sign of a more “efficient” future, I’m over advertising as well.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91230501/coca-cola-holiday-ad-ai-generated-art-coke?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss