It’s probably a mistake to read too much into it but I can’t help but notice the McDonald’s ad is kind of a mirror held up to all the things that American culture has been progressing into: cynical, mean, isolated, artificial... whatever the opposite of “wholesome” is. Totally off-key for what Christmas is supposed to stand for. Christmas (at least the secular holiday) is supposed to be about kindness, putting differences aside, enjoying people and family, and the commercial was pretty much the opposite of that.
I thought the McDonalds one was good and what does it matter it was AI ; mcdonalds makes artificial food and everything about the place is artificial so why not artificial ads?
I'm pro-AI but I thought the Coca-Cola and McDonald's ads were shit. The Coke one was especially egregious because if the creators hadn't been lazy they could have made it look half-decent. Instead it's janky and inconsistent and ugly.
Very cute story. It's a shame my cynic brain is telling me "but wolves can't survive off of berries and nuts". Also, I guess fish are fair game in the forest hierarchy. Should have user an omnivore.
I don't think it's only from a cynic point of view - the question "if meat is murder, am I a bad person if I literally can't survive without it?" is a fair and interesting one.
Of course that's not the point of the ad and I don't blame them for not making it a philosophical discussion, but it's the same approach that Madagascar uses (spoiler for a 20yo movie) to resolve their main conflict and both feel like cheating - if the penguins can think, I always thought, then so should the fishes.
Wolves (and all dogs) could be vegetarians as they aren't obligate omnivores - and in certain conditions where pray is sparse they do eat berries to surviven. Cats on the other hand are obligate carnivores and can't produce taurine amino acids, so they have to eat meat to survive.
> Also, I guess fish are fair game in the forest hierarchy
Fish don't appear to have the ability to speak or engage in social relationship with other animals in the story, so it makes sense to eat them. Like vegan find it OK eating mushrooms even though they are closer to us than they are to plants.
Intermarche have done some other great Christmas ads on a simialr theme of eating better. Their 2019 ad had a kid realizing that Santa was too rotund to fit down their chimney, so the kid spent the season visiting him at the store and handing him lettuce, homemade vegetable preserves etc. https://youtu.be/DeSG2-FuQhE?si=YvCMY4fR-7K5R8Ke
Is this newsworthy entirely because it was made without AI? It seems like a perfectly fine ad. I just don't understand why this is significant. If people just like this ad enough to vote for it, fine. But I feel like I'm missing something.
It seems like an excellent advert because it got everybody talking about McDonalds. Even this thread talks more about McDonalds than the “French supermarket’s” ad. The “French supermarket” isn’t even named in the title. The people who came up with the McDonalds ad were wildly successful in what they set out to do; they even have all the people who hate AI talking about their new ad, even when attempting to showcase somebody else’s ad.
We're at that point, where we are literally celebrating something made by humans, not machines. Wild timeline. It will get rarer and rarer as AI becomes quicker, easier, higher-quality and cheaper than it is today.
366k views in 4 days hardly qualifies as a worldwide hit. It's decent, but other ads saw more views faster this year, like that American Eagle ad with Sweeney.
It's hard to measure on Youtube due to the weight of paid views but still.
I lived through the end of the beginning of computer becoming a primary tool for art, both in building DeviantART and also I was in the second cohort of the first ever digital imaging and technology program in Canada. It was super interesting, during college was the release of the Canon 300D, things moved really quickly after, my graduating year the pro film makers associations introduced a ban on digital work within the associations "club activities" (that lasted about 16 months) - it was funny tho you would see people judging professional salons (contests) zooming in to 30000% looking for signs of digital editing - I was ~20 and it was all very amusing to me, like why did all these old people hate digital art do much? We persisted, bunch of us graduated and started a studio, one day Canon called us, I was one of the first people in the world to use a Canon 5D Mk2 months before it was released, my ads ended up on TV, we won three technical emmy awards, made lots of money, had a great time etc. All the people I know who rode the wave had fantastic careers and worked on interesting stuff, made money etc.(and btw, the last ones standing after all was said and done in the "fuck digital camp"? curmudgeons!)
fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists, I am a business/technology person who happens to be decent at story telling and naturally not awful at picture making - I would have gotten crushed by what the technologies enabled as the abstractions and programatic features opened up film making to people who didn't want to or couldn't naturally grasp the physics/controls. I'm grateful past me was able to think about this clearly because it lead me to meeting Ben and Moisey and joining them to go on and build DigitalOcean, one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
>fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists
I'm not sure if that bet really paid off. I feel like the number or both "skilled artist" and "skilled storyteller" didn't really move. It just feels higher because the barrier to entry and validation is "how well can I market myself on social media?" Not "can I get into/create my own studio?" or any other metric a craftsman would use. I don't necessarily callel this a bad thing, and I'd even argue that it only magnified existing issues instead of creating new new ones. but it has obvious down sides.
Deviant art played a part in that, so kudos. Or perhaps, you've doomed us all? Hard to say, I always had a strange relationship with DeviantArt.
You cold find plenty of people complaining about CGI up to earlier this year.
Computers are bad, unless used by exactly the necessary measure to add to the story. Then they are great. But most movies don't do that, and you can see the actors not reacting to the scenes they are in because they have no idea what's actually happening.
The same will probably happen to AI, with also most people overdoing it and making bad stuff. Forever.
I think people are setting themselves up for failure if they index their happiness or sense of self satisfaction to their ability to discern what AI-generated content is or not.
Soon, we’ll have no idea what’s AI-generated or not. I care about good, tight story telling.
Part of watching films and animations was that seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself. When all they did was enter a prompt that takes some of the magic away.
If all you care about is just the story then maybe you personally will be satisfied but a lot of people cared about the animations, cinematography, etc, and all of the work that went into that.
I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models)
Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved.
[EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality.
Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap.
Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real) vs Furiosa (a lot of CGI.)
But only bad CGI is visible. I guarantee you have watched CGI footage and not noticed. At all.
The problem over the last decade or so hasn't been the technical limits of CGI, but studio unwillingness to spend enough on it to make it good.
And directors have also become less creative. You can find UK newsreels from the 50s on YouTube, and some of the direction and editing are superb - a beautiful mix of abstraction, framing, and narrative.
Most modern directors don't have that kind of visual literacy. The emphasis is more on spectacle and trying to bludgeon audiences into submission, not on tastefulness and visual craft.
This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real)
Fury Road is pure wall to wall CGI. People keep pointing to it as some example of doing things with live action when the entire movie is soaked with CG and compositing.
It's a lot of CGI, but done in realistic ways. A lot of the examples from the article (which is a very good article, thank you for linking it) were mostly about paint-outs, color grading, or background elements.
There's a good chunk of modern blockbusters that will CGI everything in a scene except the lead actor's face - and sometimes that too.
The person I replied to said it was "mostly real". Lots of CG is done in realistic ways but people pick and choose what they decide is good based on the movies they already like. Fury Road has somehow become an example of "doing things for real" when the whole movie is non stop CG shots.
A lot of the examples from the article (which is a very good article, thank you for linking it) were mostly about paint-outs, color grading, or background elements.
No they weren't, there are CG landscapes, CG mountains, CG canyons, CG crowds, CG storms, CG cars, CG arm replacements and many entirely CG shots. It's the whole movie.
I think this might be your nostalgia. The thing looks different in different scenes, and there's a scene that feels like it's a guy inside from the way it moves. So I disagree that Alien is peak special effects. (still peak over things. Peak ambience for sure)
I didn't pick perfect examples, I picked useful ones for bounding the rough time period. Both examples are transitional.
Alien nails it like 80% of the time (I've watched it twice in the last year, in 4k on a wall-size screen, so it's fresh for me). It's an early, major example of getting it damn near perfect pretty often. Not every shot's great—like, about two-thirds of the shots of the exterior of the landing craft look like a miniature, not as glaring as a Showa-era Godzilla or anything, but you can tell—but it's still a better average than modern computer-heavy movies. It's one of the earliest that's exhibiting the potential of peak pre-CG special effects, if not nailing it all the time. But, very few movies nail it all the time, including modern ones doing the computer graphics thing.
Current-era CGI is insanely good. The problem is that it's used and abused everywhere, often with very little consideration for whether it's needed, or if there's time to do all the VFX shots etc.
I think eliminating the need to think and work around reality is part of the trouble. Not that it ruins everything (people take HN posts as so maximalist even when they factually are not; see: the rest of this comment tree) but I think the lack of the odd limitation or need to think about how to solve a problem without resorting to “render it in a computer” causes significant harm to cinema overall. I’m not (see above parenthetical) claiming it’s net-negative, but there’s a kind of film-making skill and genius that was once on display pretty widely, and now is not.
I mean for fuck’s sake, they’d probably CG the paint buckets in Home Alone if they made it today. And we’d get some tasteless can-cam shot, because you don’t have to figure it out, you can just do it. And they’d look fake because they’d move too perfectly, lacking the kinds of little off-seeming movements that a real paint can in a real take might do. Never might the can obscure a few frames of face when the directors might choose otherwise, and the result will be obviously CG through its convenience if not due to outright flaws.
Excessive perfection and too many things moving the optimal way for the shot or exactly the way the viewer expects are under-appreciated tells of CG, and they’re deadly ones, present even in a lot of “perfect” CG (give it a few years, we thought the CG in Lord of the Rings was convincing and now it looks like trash). They need to start CGing their fake environments sometimes doing something slightly less than ideal to an actor’s jacket, or something, and not to call attention to it as a comedy relief moment, but because “that’s just what happened” (not really, but it’d make the effects more convincing)
This is just rose tinted nostalgia. You are remembering the things you loved which are much simpler and forgetting all the lemon shots and limitations of the day.
The movies and TV that can be made now without the limitations of the past are significantly different, from period movies to super hero movies and everything in between. Watch the 1970s superman or logan's run and see how they hold up.
The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot. We don’t usually call that an “effect” when it’s not done with a computer. And even then… it continues to deliver “bad matte painting” often enough that spotting such failures in the wild isn’t hard (nor was it hard with bad matte paintings!)
[edit] my point, anyway, isn’t that any given effect is better. It’s not even necessarily that the movies are better (The Passion of Joan of Arc barely had effects at all, and didn’t have synced sound, for god’s sake, an it’s incredible—of course CG-having movies can be great) but that I tend to find the overall effect of those movies better. Those “seamless” mundane CG effects shots of things like composited computer-generated rooms or streets rarely get the kind of attention a real set does, and the movies suffer for it. Nobody had to move around the space with their real body and think about it, and it usually (usually! Not every single time) shows, if not in anything wrong, exactly, then in the degree to which it’s perfectly forgettable and fails to contribute anything but filling screen space.
[edit edit] more to the point, peak practical wins at convincing effects in the Big Damn Action Moment. But only peak, and that was a tragically brief span. Point me to a CG sci-fantasy space fight that looks better and/or more like a real thing that’s happening than the battle above Endor in return of the Jedi (you’ll notice I didn’t pick the earlier two movies, as Jedi is where they really perfected it all—though even the first has some shots that are quite convincing!). Like truly if you know of one I’d love to see it. I never have. They all look plainly computer generated. I’m not saying every frame of those SFX shots in Jedi is perfect, but it looks overall more real than anything similar I’ve seen done in a computer. Like you’d think in about 40 years it’d have been surpassed multiple times, but no. They all look CG.
Or, like… put the best 50% of practical shots in Jurassic Park against the best 50% of CG-heavy dino action shots in any Jurassic Park from 3 on. They’re more convincing than any of the CG shots. (Some, from the field of all practical effects shots in the film, are not convincing! But a hell of a lot are, and not just better than the median CG effect in later JPs or something, but better than all). We struggle to touch the tippy-top peak of that craft with computer effects, still today.
That's very romantic. The golden age of both cinema and animation was an assembly line, often an exploitative one. Most frames were the by product of industrial labor, done by people with little autonomy, low wages, no creative input... the human element was already highly concentrated among a very small elite, and, the majority of the labor pool was treated as mechanical/replaceable input. "seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself." Sure, but, it's not reeeaaally “a human did it.” It is more “a small number of visible artists did it.”
Good film making is good film making. I am a creative. I incorporate AI into videos that I make subtly and with a huge amount of care. I know I put more time and care into my craft than most others.
Nobody knows what involved AI and what didn’t. At the end of the day, if you care about your work, it shows.
I can almost see your point, but there are two big problems:
1) To date, there has been no example of AI that is good. It's not even close.
And 2) Why should I be interested in a story nobody was interested in telling? If you don't want to make a video, or tell a story, or write a song, then...just don't. Why even have an AI do it?
What does a visualization being to the table over a book, if it's executed in the most generic way possible? The decisions made when adapting one medium to another are what does or doesn't make it worthwhile.
Unless your goal is purely to capture people who don't and won't read, as cheaply and cynically as possible.
there is a big difference between sending the story to the AI and saying "visualize this" vs carefully describing exactly how the visualization should look like and effectively only using the AI to render your vision.
I think the objections with AI will change based on the quality of the AI generated work. What people don't want is to wade through a million gallons of poorly generated slop to see one good movie. They also don't want to have to deal with thousands of zero effort AI videos just to find one good video generated by a human being.
If the actual result of AI is an unlimited supply of adequate media personalized to our tastes, I don't foresee there being any objection. Right now, it's honestly just shovelware on a scale that hasn't been seen before. No one likes shovelware except maybe toddlers.
If we ever get to that point...im still ambivalent. I also get exposed to media to form community. And Ai very explicly wants to tear down communities and create a factory of slop. Even if we can get some good Ai storytelling, I'm not sure if a tree fighting the flood is enough. It's going to topple eventually as the roots get washed out
>In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?
I thought it was cute. I can nitpick, but it gave a feeling of family and community, and how you can't form that by devouring your peers.
The McDonald's ad meanwhile : "the world's going to shit, use McDonald's as your apocalypse bunker! (no loitering tho)". Heck, it feels like the kind of ad Fallout or Outer Worlds would make on an in-game TV.
You are framing it as "this technological advancement is being thought of as bad because we always think of new technological advancements as bad". AI is bad because of all the ways in which it is objectively bad.
It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out.
I may be wrong, but I get the sense that computer art was welcomed by people actually working in the field (did professionals criticize the computer graphics in Star Wars or Wrath of Khan?) and it was mostly the lay public that saw it as somehow not real. The opposite seems to be true for AI "art."
> It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out.
People at the time also said using a computer was fundamentally different from putting in a ton of work into building physical models.
A lot of tech adoption is motivated by economics, so the argument that "before it was more work, now it's less work" will almost always apply regardless of the specifics. I don't think it's a useful thing to focus on. It's almost a moral argument: I deserve it because I suffered for it, but he did it easy so he doesn't deserve it.
In fact, I would even go further. I would say it's part of the definition of technology. What is technology? Technology is a thing or an idea, created or discovered, that makes work easier and/or cheaper.
but there are subtle signs that the old ways made art different
people do more practical effects, they also miss the era of physical set filming[0], i personally am bored seeing the latest gpu able to create gazillions of whatever because i got the memo, gpu can do everything.. i get more magic seeing what people did with very few
don't get fooled by the "people reject evolution every time"
[0] technology can distort the focus onto the tool out of the art, films before had to arbitrate between various tricks to get a scene to work, now apparently people don't. they film bits and postprocess everything later, the tech allows infinite changes, but the cake has no taste
I agree that it's not useful if we're looking at practical stuff. It doesn't matter to me if my table was built with ten hours of human work, or ten seconds.
But for creative work? I think it matters a lot. You used the phrase "creating art." I don't think it counts as "creating" if there's no work going into it. Typing some words into a prompt box and getting a video out is not "creating," any more than doing an image search and printing out an image of a painting is creating a painting.
Printers are extremely useful devices, but they don't create art.
Lisberger recounts. "We did all those effects in about seven months, which included inventing the techniques." "Tron," however, wasn't nominated for a special-effects Oscar. "The Academy thought we cheated by using computers," he scoffs.
Writer and director Steven Lisberger made that claim in interviews, so I wouldn't quite call it an urban myth.
As far as I know, any film can be submitted for Academy Award consideration in any category, then an executive committee determines the eligibility of each submission and chooses up to 20 films to move onto the nomination process.
I don't think this committee publishes anything about its decision-making process, so presumably Lisberger is just guessing based on his impression of industry sentiment at the time.
It's a cute ad all but as a French kid I used to see similar things often, we have a good culture of animation. Is "they didn't use AI" really a criteria now?
Advertising that you didn't use AI is definitely a thing now. But this is more likely a jab at the recent McDonalds ad, which did use AI, and which the agency who made the ad vigorously defended the use of AI (hilariously, by bragging about how many hours it took to make that ad).
> vigorously defended the use of AI (hilariously, by bragging about how many hours it took to make that ad).
Likewise with the Coca Cola ad, the agency said in their defense that they had to sift through 70,000 video generations to assemble the few dozen shots in the final ad. And after all that sifting they still couldn't get the one element of continuity (the Coke truck) to look consistent from shot to shot, and had to manually composite over all of the Coke logos since the model kept mangling them.
The only mention of AI is the editorialized title in the HN submission, I don't see any mention at all in the ad or the video description. This ad does not appear to be a reaction to anything.
That’s hilarious. I had cursory familiarity with the McDonald’s situation but did not know thread agency aspect. I’d be very curious how many “hours” were spent minus the inference time.
I feel like there are subcultures that value "long hours and hard work" over "result".
If you can produce great things easily, then it is lazy. But if worked hours and hours including through Christmans, then it is great even if result is crap.
I don't watch TV and use ad-blockers on my devices so I don't have a clue of what ads look like nowadays.
And given how people are praising this one (that looks exactly like the ones I was used to growing up) I can only guess that the situation must be awful.
Everyone keeps making religious connections, but it’s worth pointing out linguistically most countries in Europe (and the world) refer to red meat, poultry, and seafood as entirely separate. Meat often just refers to red meat. English is in the minority to bucket them all under “meat”
Right? I think it’s a christian thing. There’s gotta be something about eating fish being okay in their bible because the amount of times I heard “fish aren’t meat”
"The term [meat] is sometimes used in a more restrictive sense to mean the flesh of mammalian species (pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, etc.) raised and prepared for human consumption, to the exclusion of fish, other seafood, insects, poultry, or other animals."
I think it's just a general apathy in the general population about knowing the difference. "Meat" is pig, cow, horse, rabbit, elephant or whatever, "fish" is fish meat. At a restaurant you could ask if a salad has any meat, they say no, and when it arrives, it has tiny pieces of bacon because "oh but that's almost nothing, certainly not \"meat\"".
During lent, you weren't supposed to eat meat as part of your fast. However, not eating meat is... not as enjoyable as eating meat, so they basically declared that fish doesn't count as meat so they could eat it without breaking the fast.
For similar reasons, they also declared beavers to be fish later on.
Christians are allowed to eat all food. Only Christ is what saves. (Mark 7:19)
But the fish / meat / etc is a tradition thing, so it comes from the culture surrounding the Christian, and probably more relating to Jewish history more than anything
I was told by my teacher as a kid that traditional Catholics used to believe that if you didn't eat fish on Fridays, you'd go to Hell. I wonder if that was true?
You don't have to eat fish, you just have to avoid poultry and red meat. The intent was sacrifice as penance for sins. And in the US and some other countries, it's really only mentioned during Lent (Ash Wednesday to the day before Easter); the rest of the year, it's encouraged to do that or some other form of penance, but everyone ignores it.
Everywhere there are talking animals fish are never considered to be sentient :) Think of all the cartoons and movies (except those specifically about fish).
No matter how the ad is made, it is still an ad. What's probably more important is the message. And this one was dumb as a message and as a real bad advice contributing to the increasingly brainless population who nowadays believes they can go into woods and everything there is friendly if you smile enough.
Hehe. People have "AI" fatigue (I'll include myself there, too), not only because AI content "feels" soulless, but also because the looming job displacement narrative, exacerbated by CEOs, VCs, etc. There'll be a big consumer pushback against companies using AI to lay off employees, etc
>There'll be a big consumer pushback against companies using AI to lay off employees, etc
No there won't. Same how there was no consumer pushback when everything from your Nikes to Apple computers moved to be made in China by slave labor and gutted your manufacturing industry at the same time while consumers and shareholders cheered.
Consumers only care about value for money not where or how a product is made. People's morals go out the window when their hard earned paycheque is on the line. Capitalist competition is dehumanizing by nature. The only thing that can help maintain humanity is government regulation because expecting consumers to prioritize morality over price has always failed.
If AI companies give consumers the same product but cheaper, they'll win.
Interesting. I agree with you that consumers prioritize price over morality, but not when their livelihood is directly or indirectly negatively affected by AI, and the people are starting to notice it.
>but not when their livelihood is directly or indirectly negatively affected by AI, and the people are starting to notice it.
And do what about it? People don't give a shit AI is replacing creators jobs same how people didn't give a shit automation or offshoring replaced blue collar jobs. Literally nobody cared when the actors and writers went on strike so nobody will care when they'll be replaced by AI.
Especially when the quality of human made entertainment has been on a steep decline over the last 10 years consumers will even cheer to see them replaced same how they cheered when they could buy higher quality Japanese made cars at lower prices.
> I agree with you that consumers prioritize price over morality, but not when their livelihood is directly or indirectly negatively affected by AI...
No consumer complained 15 years ago when the VFX industry in LA was outsourced to Vancouver and London due to subsidizes [0], and no consumer complained when VFX in Vancouver or London was outsourced to India and China over the last 5 years. No one will complain when VFX studios leverage AI to create content and then maybe have around 20-30% of the remaining humans edit videos to be humanlike.
Ironically, the Trump admin proposed a tariff that would help bring VFX back to the US [1] but the same consumers who on here are complaining about AI and Offshoring are the same ones who opposed such a tariff. Of course, if the Biden or a hypothetical Harris admin did something similar, they would also be flamed severely.
And thus the cycle continues. You all will keep complaining, but will keep purchasing from Costco, Trader Joe's, Patagonia, etc, will keep consuming content from one of the handful of companies that have consolidated media, and will remain employed by tech companies that in some shape or form continue to help maintain this cycle.
Statistically speaking, the demographic on HN told blue collar workers in 2009-17 to "learn to code". Why should they have sympathy for you? And thus the cycle continues.
I remember a french comic called Le loup en slip (literally the wolf in underwear), was it by any chance made by the same artists? Both the style and story have a lot in common.
Honestly I think the reason the ad is so popular is because at the end, the look that the wife gives to the husband is precisely what every man wants in his life.
The video itself might not be generated, but who knows about the script (quite generic Christmas Carol, Shrek, Wolf trope), the character design, the models, the animations, etc?
edit: getting downvoted to hell, but I think my question is valid. What does it mean "no AI"? Are we just limiting ourselves to the render?
It means no AI. If I say you used no AI but had an LLM write or refine the script, I would have lied.
You may be getting downvoted because your comment's tone can read as accusatively presumptive. "Who knows" isn't a useful contribution to almost any discussion. Which is a shame, because you raise an interesting point–I would personally feel fine saying no AI was used to do work even if I used AI to help me with research. (Provided I read all the primary sources.)
The family were sitting around the table eating dinner while the kids was getting a story read to him about the present he just received. Nothing Christmasy about that at all.
The ad illustrates the Christmas spirit and fish is a Christian religious symbol and actually traditional at Christmas in some countries and areas. I don't know if they did it on purpose in this ad or just because it would obviously not have worked for the wolf to bring a meat dish.
I was confused because one of the characters tells the wolf he might have more friends if he didn't go around killing animals all the time. Then the wolf starts making vegetarian dishes, and I thought, okay, they're promoting vegetarianism. Great.
But then later the wolf is killing fish, and that's ...okay I guess because they don't talk or walk like the other animals? The speciesism hit hard.
As a wolf, I find this advertisement very offensive to carnitarians. Prey animals were clearly made for our use and enjoyment, and the idea of some sort of multi-special gathering, finding a least common denominator in the predation of pescids (simply absurd for a canid), is insulting to our way of life and frankly racist.
Whoa! 7.5 miles is a long swim. Thanks for the interesting article. Just so you know, that article says “During the salmon and herring spawning seasons, nearly one-quarter of this coastal wolf’s diet is fish” so I don’t think it supports your claim, exactly.
Major pet peeve of mine is when people unironically spread literal advertisements, whether it's because they're "cute" or people are outraged at them or whatever it may be.
The ad is doing it on purpose. It is literally manipulating you and you are spreading the malicious influence to other people. It's not AI but it sure is 'slop'. Propaganda, even.
It's an ad by a grocery store advocating healthy eating and inclusion.
I think people will make reasonable decisions about whether or not to purchase food this winter with or without the "malicious influence" of these ads.
The irony is that Christmas is the time for unhealthy eating but is it still allowed to show in ads?
Personally I interpreted the fish as either a timely Christian symbol (and fish at Christmas is traditional in some places) or simply because a meat dish would not have worked in context.
True the vast majority of the time. This ad though doesn’t promote anything malicious. It’s a cute story with the message “eat healthy stuff like vegetables and fish”, with a brand name/ logo at the very end.
And as a (very occasional) customer, I like that this company is signalling that it does not oppose inclusion and doesn't mind questioning "traditional values" (the wolf eating animals).
Many actors these days (both companies and political figures) are very much signalling the contrary, so some kind of signalling is absolutely useful.
"You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss."
It is possible to have art and artist be separate things; to acknowledge that that reason a thing was created and/or who it was created by can be looked at separately from the thing itself. This commercial was fun to watch. The Budweiser horse commercials are also fun to watch. But enjoying them has very little to do with a choice to support the creator.
I'm ok with people caring about whatever they want. What I dislike is people trying to create artificial groups. Like "pro AI" and "anti AI" then try to sell them shit because now this is part of their tribe.
You can also just skip advertising to whole world about what you dislike, and your projected dislikes of whatever else you need to comment on, unrelated to original topic of a simple ad for enjoying Christmas with others regardless of your origins while eating well. Nobody here is doing anything you complain about.
People really don't care that much, especially when for something positive, original and funny somebody grumpy comes along and tries to drag discussion down their misery pit.
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