The Unreal Thing

What Coca Cola's Christmas Ad and Ben Affleck Tell Us About AI and the Future of the Creative Industries

Catch-up service:
Are You Charismatic or Charming?
Why Does Donald Trump Keep Happening?
The Historian and the Culture Warrior
Giving Up On the Humanities Is a Mistake
The Orangutan Theory of Intelligence

Coca Cola’s “Holidays Are Coming/Christmas Truck” ad has the flavour of a timeless classic, although it has only been around since 1995 (apologies to younger readers but the 1990s will always sound like the week before last to me). It has been through various iterations since then. The latest one has kicked up a fuss, at least in the ad industry. Coke asked an agency called Silverside AI to create a ‘modern interpretation’ of the ad, and they have been trumpeting the result as completely AI-generated. This is from Adweek (with quotes from the agency’s co-founders):

Silverside AI turned to generative AI platforms including Stable Diffusion, Pactto, DALL-E, ChatGPT, and its own tool Director Magic to create the ad, in a process that felt more like “software development” than traditional filmmaking, said Pereira. Using AI sped up the creation process and allowed creatives to see ideas come to life instantly. Silverside AI “produced a rough draft of the spot within three days of one of our first meetings [with the client],” Wrubel recalled. “The moment you have a process where creatives can immediately see ideas come to life in real time, it transforms the creative process altogether. It’s a revolutionary thing,” Pereira said. 

Sounds exciting! Here is the ad: