Coca-Cola, the harbinger of the AI-pocolypse?

Well, it’s official.

We are entering the certified doomsday scenario. The lid on Pandora’s box has been lifted, the can of worms is open, the train has no breaks. Whatever idiom suits your fancy, but the message is still the same.

I was still holding on to some naive hope that we wouldn’t get to this point. The writing had been on the wall for awhile now, but I thought that there was still a chance that, if enough people continued to push back at both the disturbing look of it and the gross injustice of its production, the wheels of capitalism might hopefully shift in the right direction.

But then I saw it. I was sitting on my parents couch, innocently watching a college football game, when it assaulted my eyes. For thirty straight seconds, Coca-Cola decided to subject me to a horror that insulted both my intelligence and my four summers of dedicated service to put their products on the shelves of County Market and Walmart.

H.P. Lovecraft often is vague in his descriptions of the Eldritch monstrosities, a technique utilized to help illustrate the fact that these horrors are beyond the capabilities of humans to describe using words. Similarly, I find it difficult to put a description of this Coca-Cola ad to paper…perhaps this is what being an unfortunate protagonist in one of Lovecraft’s tales is like.

Still, for any of this to make any sense, I must try my best. For what I witnessed was a commercial like no other, but I fear others of its ilk will become all too commonplace. It was, as the text at the bottom of the screen proclaimed, an ad made by Real Magic AI, a hilariously ironic name given that nothing on screen was remotely “real” and very debatably “magic” (though, unfortunately, very “AI”).

The first three shots suggest nothing is afoot, luring you in as a quick pass at a bottle of Coke being opened and two landscape shots fall into the wheelhouse of what current AI is capable of for the second they are on screen. But then, just as quickly, a disgusting image of what is supposed to be an elk or a reindeer appears on screen, instantly shattering any sort of disbelief the opening shots may have suspended. It is wholly unnerving, the way this animal moves jankily while half the snowflakes “fall” upwards in soft focus around it. The polar bear that has become synonymous with Coca-Cola Christmas ads then appears in the next shot, its eye shape wobbling in and out of existence as it bursts out of the water. Then, horribly deformed trucks strung with Christmas lights set out to deliver disgusting AI Coca-Cola to this AI world, their wheel wells threatening to break this facade of reality with just how extremely horrible they look in motion. The ad also drags poor puppies into fray, creating a disturbing facsimile of a golden retriever and begging its audience to believe that it is real. Somehow, only half the commercial has passed, and I feel ill. It feels like I am watching the death of the universe, only with seven-eighths of it out of focus so you can’t tell how fake everything looks. But the mind-bend-ing trucks continue their journey across this God-forsaken simulation of Earth and I slide further into despair. Finally, the attack on my retinas ends, with Coca-Cola proudly proclaiming “Real Magic” under its logo, still without a sniff of irony despite what just happened over the last 30 seconds.

I cannot believe what I just saw. Surely…no, surely one of the richest companies in the world wouldn’t put out something like “this.” There was no way this slop could have made its way through the corporate labyrinth of pitch meetings and focus groups, right?

Even now, weeks later, its imagery haunts me. I cannot get that elk/reindeer out of my head, nor the morphing Coca-Cola trucks treading through some snowy suburban neighborhood that has never existed but was rather constructed from a million images of snowing suburban neighborhoods.

But, as disturbing as the commercial itself was, it was what it represented that is the true horror. The fact that the megacorporation Coca-Cola made something as completely soulless as this ad during Christmas…well, if that doesn’t speak for itself, I don’t know what will. In the endless pursuit of profits, this company decided to forgo utilizing real human ingenuity and creativity and opted to have a computer make something instead. Worse yet, they thought that their audience would neither notice, nor care. And…perhaps the scariest of all is that they may be right.

The number of horrible AI created images that I’ve seen on social media is astounding, and yet, they continue to get thousands of likes and shares. Netflix has used AI to create backgrounds for some of its animated shows. This commercial was likely seen by millions, and a company worth over $250 billion thought they could sell even more syrup water by showing it to them. So, I’m left to wonder, do we really lack the media literacy to tell what is real or what is not, or do we just not care?

Machine learning is an impressive technology. It has many applications that can make many mundane or time consuming tasks easier and, as it gets better, hopefully it will be utilized for those purposes. But right now, it is being used as a shortcut for pursuits it is both ill-equipped to handle at this time and, I would argue, are better off left in the hands of humans anyway. AI art, without truly machine sentience, cannot be any more than wholly and truly derivative. But there is money to be made, so money must be made.

We are rapidly approaching the point of no return…or maybe we’ve just whizzed right past it. It’s hard to tell with how blurry all these AI images are. All I know is that if I have to be subjected to some company trying to sell me fizzy drinks, I’d feel a bit better knowing someone was at least paid to animate the CGI polar bear attempting to do it.

A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW

BY

NATHANIEL U NDERWOOD REPORTER