The AI rubber is definitely meeting reality road, and here’s one net impression:

Creative quality, fidelity, and credibility are all winding up as roadkill.  

And not just for the short term.

Coke’s holiday production cost-control Frankentest was just the initial lump of coal.

A newly sighted sore: a Still Gin spot featuring Dre and Snoop (who's clearly decided to hoover up every conceivable sponsorship coin, overexposure be damned) encountering Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. in, shock, a bar. 

Dead OG’s meet still-living OG's is the general drift (link below).

In it, you see how a skilled human director, astronomically pricy celebrity talent, wonderfully lush set design, and solid editorial can founder on the rocks of an obvious deep fake. 

Even if said fake was fully licensed.

On display are all the faults of present-day AI renderings: hyper-saturation, jarring background blends, overly idealized human shapes, cartoonish puppetry, truly unpersuasive voicing, all pretending to be visually perfect, ergo, all sadly flawed.

The argument is whether anyone, aside from a few professional nitpickers will give a flying.

Technology pundit Shelly Palmer, despite pissing all over the Coke spot, reads the positive System1 consumer ad tests as evidence that nobody will.

I’m more in the besieged creative camp with strategist William Charnock, who, reflecting on the Coke example, writes, “Leveraging past and established equities is much easier/cheaper than building these equities in the first place.”  

He goes on to argue, “… it might be much harder to use AI to create this because it demands originality, surprise, emotional resonance, and relevance that AI can’t yet achieve…. So, I do not doubt the ads test well, but they suck life from the brand rather than add life to the brand.”

Preach, colleague.  

But then he goes on to a real kicker: “consumer response to AI and a growing resistance with which nothing to do with the response to the ad but is a response to knowing the ad was AI generated.”

This, he roundhouses is “the dynamic that has led Gartner to predict a 50% decrease in usage of social media by 2025 and the emergence of “acoustic brands” who differentiate themselves by keeping experiences human, organic, natural…”

Writ large: 

1) There’s a steep price to fakery, even the kind that only registers as “feelings” about a brand’s genuineness.   

2) By leaping whole hog into this technology before it’s ready for prime time, we’re pouring our audience a craftless cocktail composed in equal parts of cynicism and suspicion and distrust. 

3) All while conditioning the audience to accept dreck execution as acceptable. 

4) The consequences, not unlike problems from the unending barrage of dull to frequency overload, spill over to infect and erode the channels we, as an industry, rely on for life-sustaining oxygen.

Next up: a conversation about how Open AI’s new Sora video generator and why that’s only gonna make the road ahead that much tougher.

But before we go there, pausing for you. Care to share? 

https://www.vibe.com/news/movies-tv/dr-dre-snoop-dogg-rat-pack-still-g-i-n-commercial-1234957398/