The annoying beer ad created by artificial intelligence – a new era for advertising?

We published this story on Yahoo en Español on May 3, 2023. We are showing it again to our users because it appeared Among the most viewed and commented Our site is available throughout the year.

A new commercial for American beer may seem like a nightmare, but some say it's still better than Bud Light's latest campaign. asked the London company artificial intelligence To create a commercial based on what you see in typical American beer ads, the audience describes it as “fantastically awful.”

The clip, called “Synthetic Summer”, is based on a garden party where people are enjoying beer in cans and bottles with blue labels, but if you look closely you can see the show's markings.

Although many fear a future where AI-generated media becomes indistinguishable from traditional media and destroys society and/or civilization in the process, we are not there yet. An example of this is a surreal AI-generated beer ad that went viral this weekend.

The 30-second video first appeared on Instagram a week ago, and was created by Helen Power and Chris Boyle, from a London production company called Privateisland.tv. They apparently created it using Runway's new Gen-2 AI model, which can create short videos based on written instructions similar to how Stable Diffusion creates still images.

In the video, shot against a bustling backdrop of crowds and Smash Mouth's song “All Star,” we see people partying at a stereotypical American backyard barbecue, sometimes physically merging over impressionistic mugs of beer. The women laugh, their jaws open. Beer cups become cans. The burning grills reach the state of a fiery tornado and arc across the yard. It's a surreal vision of hell that feels both familiar and startlingly strange.

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Why does it seem so strange to us?

Today, AI-powered video generators are still primitive. While their creators train the models, they work from a much smaller set of source materials than static AI image synthesis models, and the models are more computationally expensive to run.

The impressionistic view of beer commercials probably comes from capturing the essence of real beer advertisements in the Gen-2 dataset. Runway didn't disclose the dataset used to train the Gen-2, but in the Gen-1 (older model) paper, it referred to an “internal dataset of 240 million images and a custom dataset of 6.4 million videos.”

Commercial has a trick

As revealed by Ars TechnicaGen-2 is currently in a closed testing phase, and creating videos of this type still requires some human assistance, to evaluate the images and achieve an acceptable result. However, the resulting clip lasts only a few seconds.

In the case of “Synthetic Summer,” Privateisland.tv created the clips, selected the best ones, and put the clips together in a sequence, adding music and sound effects. That is, it is not entirely manufactured by artificial intelligence.

Each of these human-made pieces assembled demonstrates that generative AI still has a long way to go before it autonomously wows audiences with memes that change society.

There are still people leading these extraterrestrial businesses, so we can feel calm…more or less.

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