One of my favourite parts of the run-up to Christmas has always been the warm, heartwarming bliss reflected through festive-themed commercials. Sure, these adverts have always had one goal at the end of the day: to sell products and make profit. But, inadvertently, there has always been something warm and personal about them. They are often produced by huge teams of creatives who work tirelessly for months to make them perfect, and to make consumers feel this warm feeling which subliminally messages us: “Buy our products!” But this year’s trio of Coca-Cola advertisements are something altogether different. This year’s advertisements have been generated as a homage to the classic 1995 Holidays are Coming ad campaign. Each of the ads was created with AI, two of which featuring various animals, and one of which featuring human characters, which have been notoriously difficult for AI to generate without looking plastic and robotic.
This clearly hasn’t been an exception with the newest set of Coca-Cola ads, with the only appearance of Father Christmas we receive, in the ad titled Secret Santa, being his rubbery, modelling-clay–like fingers grasping a Coca-Cola bottle, while a familiar festive tune plays in the background, desperately trying to persuade our brains to not ignite the uncanny valley. In Unexpected Santa, a six-fingered hand can be seen opening a Coca-Cola bottle.
The truth is, a huge team of creatives never once touched upon the creation of these ads, which were created with generative AI models made by AI studios Secret Level, Silverslide, and Wildcard. While in the words of many X users, the AI ads are “creepy” and “ugly”, using AI in this way also creates a very problematic precedent for those in creative industries. AI doesn’t just come out of nowhere, and it must be generated with pre-existing material created by human hand. In this way, AI could be said to be a form of plagiarism, and a threat to any creative industry which was previously tasked with not just creating these campaigns, but creating art in the form of designs, literature, or even acting.
Of course, these advertisements are not without their defenders. Pratik Thakar, Cola-Cola’s vice president argued the use of AI saves money, and also time, stating “[it’s] more than cost, it’s the speed”. But this is also something we should think about critically. The last financial quarter placed Coca-Cola’s profit margins at 2.85 billion US dollars. The company has the financial resources to create traditional ad campaigns, as it has done for decades previously, which create countless jobs for creative industries and therefore stimulate the economy, benefiting us as a society.
Arguably, the generation of these ads is not an unprecedented force. After all, if the point of a Christmas advertisement has always been to create money and get consumers to buy products, why would a company choose to spend millions and dictate time to creating a perfect ad campaign, when we can hand over these highly skilled tasks to the robots. Perhaps, the famous line in the song used for each of these ads, “’tis the season, it’s always the real thing”, should begin to be taken with a pinch of salt.