This new AI beer commercial popped up and, well… it’s terrifying in the way only AI generated art and video can be. So why do I keep watching? And why do I spot things I love the more I view? This AI generated beer ad is horrific, but I keep pressing restart.
Now, AI generated art is bad and the controversy around AI art scraping images from the internet and reusing them caused protests on ArtStation. AI still can’t fully grasp rendering hands, or anatomy in general, as the horrendous AI-generated pizza ad showed. But like that ad of non-people gobbling down pizzas like an excitable seal pup lumbering towards the ocean, I kind of love these awful AI-generated commercials.
This beer ad has all the hallmarks we’ve come to expect from Ai-generated images and video: spaghetti hands (tick), Alien-mouths (tick), toothy grins (tick), floating objects (tick, tick, tick). It’s not simply that AI has a blank spot for creating lifelike humans or even realistic beer cans – these ones float and warp like gluey, buttery cylinders – but it’s how everything is hyper sensationalised.
This AI beer commercial begins as a sleepy BBQ and ends in an explosive, fiery apocalypse like a scene from Terminator 2. “This is what hell looks like,” wrote one Twitter user. “At least we know now.” Another Twitter user joked, “Does the LSD come with the beer or is that BYO?”
The speedy cuts and chops and edits escalate the pace of the commercial to the point of a hedonistic surge of beer-fuelled chaos. Yes, it’s terrifying but it’s also incredibly engaging. There’s a decadent, unrestrained AI eye behind this chaos and I think we may be stumbling into a new CG aesthetic.
In one shot a woman sups at the side of a beer can with gusto, two men draw on a floating glass beer bong, a severed hand floats in beer glass and no-one cares; a man sucks beer through thin air and an eleven-fingered hand offers a guest a cold brew. It is horrific, but this AI-generated nonsense is also scarily engaging.
We could be on the verge of a new trend with this weird unreal aesthetic. As a greater number of people create clips with this wild look, and the more viral these videos become, it’s only a matter of time before this ‘style’ is aped by an agency of a major brand, if only to be subversive.
In fact, this AI beer ad was created by London agency Private Island using Stable Diffusion, Control Net, and Runway Gen 2 with the goal of aping an American-style beer commercial. So the future could well be this peculiar AI art direction.
“We are creating a series of in-house experiments that help us figure out how these tools can be used in production – Synthetic Summer is our most recent,” said Director and co-founder Chris Boyle in an article for Stash Media (opens in new tab). He added: “If 2022 was the year generative image stills went mainstream, 2023 will for sure be the same with motion.”
As AI becomes more freely available and trusted brands other ethical apps and uses, such as Adobe Firefly and Nvidia Picasso, it feels like we’re on the verge of something new happening. I don’t imagine this will be the demise of the need for real artists, in fact as more bizarre AI art is created the likelihood is art from actual humans, and physical art in particular, will become more sought after and prized. Now, excuse me, but I need to rewatch this silliness again.