Article in the New York Times Magazine

A.I. and TV Ads Were Made for Each Other

A string of uncanny videos show what generative A.I. and advertising have in common: They chew up the cultural subconscious and spit it back at us.

By Mac Schwerin
June 27, 2023

Even if I didn’t work in advertising, I would be a connoisseur of commercials. You’re probably one, too. Think of all the tropes you’ve ingested over the years — the forest-green hatchbacks conquering rugged Western landscapes, the miles of mozzarella stretched by major pizza chains. These are the images that let you know what kind of pitch you’re watching, so you won’t be confused when the brand shows up.

The same applies to one recent video: It begins, conventionally enough, at a barbecue, where a Smash Mouth song is playing and people are chatting happily over beers. But around three seconds in, your amygdala starts paging for backup. The partygoers are laughing too aggressively. A blonde seems to be talking to her beer, which she holds in a fleshy koozie of misshapen fingers. There are strange shots of lips and drinks, cavorting without ever properly meeting. The beverages keep getting bigger, obscenely big. A fire begins spreading, filling the frame like a space-shuttle launch.

This is “Synthetic Summer,” a fake beer commercial produced entirely with generative artificial intelligence. It’s one of a handful of A.I. commercials that have been making the rounds online. “Synthetic Summer” evokes an Instagram post from the Cenobites in “Hellraiser”: a buffet of ungodly desires, remorselessly fulfilled. In another A.I. commercial, “Pepperoni Hug Spot,” we find a family pizza restaurant beset by predatory mouths and 1970s wipe transitions. Another video, a fake ad for orange juice by the artist Crypto Tea, cuts between crisp pour shots and deranged breakfasters; Donald Trump narrates.

A.I. isn’t pumping this weird stuff out unbidden. Behind each commercial is an impish tech enthusiast with a knack for these new tools, nudging things into absurdity. Chris Boyle, the originator of “Synthetic Summer,” told me his prompts for the text-to-video A.I. program included requests for more fire as the commercial progressed. Ultimately, though, it’s a computer that interprets these instructions: The freaky visual smorgasbord it serves up is homegrown, and about as close as you can get to the uncanny without resorting to sleep or psilocybin.

A.I. tools like Midjourney and Gen-2 are so in thrall to commercials, in fact, that the word itself elicits their respect. The director of “Pepperoni Hug Spot” told me that when he added “TV commercial” to text prompts like “a happy family eating pizza in a restaurant,” the A.I. rendered clips that were more evenly lit. The best results, Boyle told me, came from prompting the program to deliver something “as generic and middle-of-the-road Americana as possible.”

Commercials, at this point, are America’s cave paintings: a series of icons we hand down through the years from one target market to the next. Their visual syntax is often clearer to us than the realities they supposedly draw from. I’ve spent my life training my own organic neural network on glamorized images of beachside bonfires, generic office shenanigans, rise-and-grind sports montages, chemically horned-up retirees, unblemished sneakers on gritty streets. I have never dined al fresco to live jazz or surprised a spouse during the holidays with the gift of his-and-hers new cars, but my mind can conjure those moments as easily as anything else. Now computers can, too.

Some of the people who make commercials today are worried that A.I. could take their jobs, just as soon as it figures out how hands work. But asking A.I. to make fake ads gives it a job it already excels at: assistant ethnographer, media-studies expert, unbiased auditor of cultural tropes. This software, having slurped up the same commercial soup as the rest of us, takes a prompt like “family breakfast” or “outdoor party” and, based on the mass of examples on which it has been trained, calculates its way toward some probabilistic mean. It offers a composite picture of formulas and clichés — including those we’re usually too immersed in to notice.

In that orange-juice ad, for instance, we get a couple of shots of the classic juice pitcher — a wholly superfluous instrument whose purpose is to make us forget that the product is not freshly squeezed. Usually a few slices of citrus, floating elegantly inside, help sell that illusion. The A.I. has seen this fruit but cannot know why it’s there — and so the version it creates is a rogue foreign body, a cancerous green lump that starts to subsume the juice entirely. In “Synthetic Summer,” the partygoers seemingly don’t know how to drink: They hold cans a few inches from their faces or latch their lips to the sides. That’s probably because their real-life analogues hardly ever drink in commercials, either; it’s a convention of alcohol ads to show good times without explicitly depicting anyone taking a swig. This visual euphemism leaves a gap that A.I. struggles to bridge — and ends up filling with comical, unsettling imagery. This is one reason the A.I. commercials reward repeat viewing: Once you get past their grotesqueries, you start seeing fascinating signals buried in the noise.

Until the noise changes. One weakness of these tools is that by the time they’ve rounded up a genre’s common tropes, the genre may have moved on. “Synthetic Summer,” for instance, has the DNA of a 20-year-old Bud Light commercial; it bears little resemblance to the brand’s latest Super Bowl spot. For the moment, these are fever dreams of a recent past.

As far as brands are concerned, that’s fine: They need not train A.I. on ads from the glory days of linear television. In a fractured, polarized world, that kind of shared consensus may be obsolete. Companies seem a lot more likely to feed their A.I. furnaces with every available piece of data about potential customers — everything you’ve liked, bought or posted, every consumer demographic into which you might plausibly fit. The images and videos you see then may or may not be real, but they could easily feature the people and scenes that will most appeal to you or play most intimately on your insecurities. Which, when you think about it, could be a lot creepier than a few extra fingers.

Full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/magazine/ai-ads-commercials.html