Artificial Intelligence

[Maryokutai]

 

This year's winter ad for Coca-Cola was made by AI. I find it more than a little concerning that this went through all of their greenlighting processes without anyone ever raising their hand and pointing out that it looks like trash.

[shinymcshine]

TBH I'm not really seeing much difference than if it was made using 'traditional' CGI methods - but I'm not scrutinizing it that closely, as for this application it probably doesn't matter that much*.

 

* well aside from the ethical workforce debates

[HandsomeDead]

The only thing I noticed after one watch was it would switch between different kinds of lorry but there's an argument that they're meant to be.  It's not a good argument but still.  And of course theres AI's favourite, the slight pan on a soulless object.

 

Its difficult with adverts because these are hardly passion projects for creatives but at the same time it is hands on experience for filmmakers and animators.  Many started their careers doing stuff like this and the more you take away that route it will have knock-on effects.

[Maryokutai]

I'd disagree with that, at least a little. Passion projects, no, definitely not, but there are people who genuinely like doing that kind of work and there is a certain amount of freedom available, at least in early pitch phases before it goes through the wringer of suits giving the green light. But yeah, this ultimately leads to the same result and the point you're making.

 

In this video I think the animals are a dead giveaway (focus very much on dead). The reindeer-that-looks-like-an-elk and squirrels in particular look really fake but not in the classic CGI way.

[one-armed dwarf]

In one scene it looks like the trucks are driving backwards for a bit

 

That highly limited camera movement has to be the next main problem they try to fix with this AI stuff. Like right now it doesn't feel like video at all, it feels like slightly sludgy moving images that are also static. It's hard to describe the strangeness it conjures

 

It's like when you're dreaming about running away from something but you're not able to move, it's like the video version of this somehow

[Maf]

I haven’t watched but even looking at that thumbnail I can see it’s not right 

 

It’s hard to even say what it is. The water loops goopy. The water level doesn’t look right. Something weird with the lighting and shadows. There’s something off about the texture of everything in the shot

 

It’s hard to say exactly but there’s something gross about just looking at it 

[mfnick]

All AI videos have a weird unfocused blurry look to them for me. Especially animals. The light tunnel looked terrible too. We’ve already lost this battle though  so can’t do much apart from me depressed about it.

[Sly Reflex]

Puffins are winter birds?

 

Generally I think it's sort of impressive that they can do this, but parts of it are just plain shit.

Why is there a Puffin?

The nose on the reindeer looks off.

 

The polar bear doesn't look wet when it breaches, the whole scene looks super broken.

 

Really weird focus.

 

Fumes coming from the front of the vehicle?

 

One of the vehicles is a random Polish PoS from WWII while all the others seem to be from various era's of American trucking?

 

Incorrect reflections.

 

Just going to ignore the bits from the dog  up to the racoons. It's whatever. It could be worse but there's a real mismatch between making things look real and also putting clothes on them.

 

Yet another truck, this time a Euro style cab over.

 

I just had to have a look and apparently Puffins are winter aligned, but they have fuck all to do with Christmas, at least in the culture I am from. I don't know about others. I could vision all the other animals shown on Christmas cards, but that one bird is jarring as fuck.

[Maryokutai]

I suppose in a really, really depressing way this got people talking about it way more than heir traditional ads the last couple of years. So not only did they spent less money on it, they got more out if it, too.

[Maf]

He’s probably right but I hate it 

[one-armed dwarf]

45 minute episode of Succession with Kendall and Stewie having an affair, wtf I love AI now

[Maf]

On the one hand using AI instead of a 1000 people to render some CGI does make sense and makes current methods sound like a waste. At the same time I hate the idea of people losing jobs to AI. Or even admin. It’s all right him saying AI will help reduce the laborious jobs of filmmaking. Laborious for who? Someone’s getting paid for that
 

Not to be dooming but outside of building trade jobs I feel like AI is either going to make 100’s of millions of people unemployed, or every job will be an AI assistant job where the AI does the work and you just press a button to confirm like working at a factory  

[one-armed dwarf]

Unfortunately the film industry has very little respect for VFX. Feels like it's always been that way but it's been particularly bad in the past couple years, was reading that the Black Panther VFX guys had mere weeks to work on the Killmonger fight (I've not seen the film but I know Michael Jordan plays the character). So the quality of it wasn't great but it's cause of this assembly line mentality when it comes to the visualisation of everything going on.

 

Hell, even SpiderVerse is like this. A film that's super carried by its VFX talent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Across_the_Spider-Verse#Allegations_of_poor_working_conditions

 

So it's utterly unsurprising to hear some faux concern here from Affleck as to the way AI is going to hit people like that, even if he's largely correct in what he's saying.

[one-armed dwarf]

Big news in the land of AI this week with China's DeepSeek LLM, which significantly outperforms ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost

 

Uh, I'll just link the summary article, not going to attempt an explanation of something I have a fuzzy grasp of

 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/27/tech-shares-asia-europe-fall-china-ai-deepseek

 

Time to sell those nvidia stocks if you have them, possible. I mean, I dunno

[Maf]

I don’t know. On the one hand I don’t really want China to have the most powerful version of the most ground breaking important technology of right now but on the other hand I kind of want every right wing leading western country to burn and die so swings and roundabouts I guess 

[HandsomeDead]

It's open source so China doesn't "have" it, no-one does, or everyone does.  That's why the tech venture capitalists are so mad about it.

[Maf]

Oh, ok, I thought it was just because it was better, cheaper and only available in China I should have read more 

[DANGERMAN]

I don't really care the reasons, anything that upsets the tech bros is hilarious 

[mfnick]

Someone posted AI has stolen Open AI’s job. That really tickled me.

[Nag]

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-red-line-b2687013.html

 

Wonderful...