AI sucks, and there’s no way this bubble doesn’t burst sometime soon, but the C-suites are still all-in on AI, which means the corporations are going to keep shoving it down our throats with no regard for whether we like it or not. Is AI terrible for the environment? Sure. Is it driving up your electricity bill? Most likely. Does it constantly make mistakes because it doesn’t actually know anything? Of course. But it’s not like CEOs care about any of that stuff. I mean, just look at Coke’s latest AI-generated ad — the delivery truck doesn’t even have a consistent axle configuration.
We aren’t just talking about one brief shot where the truck shown has a different axle configuration. It changes constantly throughout the 60-second ad’s runtime, and I’m pretty sure several of them are physically impossible. In fact, the configuration changes 10 different times. It’s also so noticeable that someone made a graphic showing all the different axle configurations in one convenient image. Did no one notice that before it got final approval? Someone had to have noticed it, right? And yet, they still put it out there for the public to see.
This should be so embarrassing
Did they just not think anyone would notice? If so, that’s even worse than if they were just too lazy or cheap to fix it, because we’ve had the internet for a couple of decades now, and if there’s one thing the internet does, it’s notice things. Somewhere, in some weird corner of the internet, someone is yelling through their keyboard about how some movie they saw used outfits sewn with the wrong stitch. So yeah, one truck with 10 different axle configurations is going to get noticed.
But hey, at least Coke saved a little money by not having to pay humans to make a good commercial with trucks that have consistent, realistic axle configurations. And that’s really what matters, isn’t it? To get rid of as many human workers as possible? After all, every dollar that goes toward someone’s salary is a dollar the owners don’t get to keep. Of course, if everyone gets replaced by a robot at work, then no one will have any money to buy those companies’ products and services, but that’s not a problem now. That’s a problem for some future CEO to deal with, and right now, getting richer is more important than other people’s lives.
Is that probably more of a bummer than you were hoping to read when you clicked on this post? Probably. But also, it’s Coke’s fault for making a real bummer of an ad, not my fault for writing about it. Okay, maybe it’s a little my fault. Sorry about that (but only a little).
