A confusing beer ad created by artificial intelligence, a new era for advertising?

We published this story on Yahoo en Español on May 3, 2023. As it appears, we show it again to our users Among the most viewed and commented on On our site all year round.

A new American beer ad may sound like a dream, but some say it's even better than Bud Light's last campaign. asked a London firm Artificial intelligence To build a business based on what you see in a typical American beer ad, the public calls it “incredibly cruel.”

Titled “Synthetic Summer,” the clip is based on a garden party where people are enjoying beers in cans and bottles with blue labels, but if you look closely you can see the software logos. .

While many fear a future where AI-generated media becomes indistinguishable from traditional media and destroys society and/or civilization, we're not there yet. A surreal beer ad created by artificial intelligence that went viral this weekend is a case in point.

The 30-second video, created by Helen Power and Chris Boyle from London-based production company Privateisland.tv, first appeared on Instagram a week ago. They built it using Runway's new Gen-2 AI model, which can create short video clips based on written instructions, similar to how static diffusion can create static images.

In the video, set against a raucous crowd of Smash Mouth's “All Star,” we see people partying at a barbeque simulated in an American backyard barbeque, and at times physically uniting with impressionistic beer glasses. The women smile, their jaws open. Beer glasses become cans. Blazing grills reach fire hurricane status and arc across the yard. It's a surreal vision of hell that feels both familiar and breathtakingly strange.

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Why does this seem strange to us?

Today, AI video generators are primitive. When their creators train the models, they work from much smaller source material than still-image AI synthetic models, and the models are computationally more expensive to run.

The impressionistic view of beer ads may have come from absorbing the essence of an actual beer ad in the Gen-2 data set. Runway did not disclose the dataset used to train Gen-2, but the Gen-1 (old model) paper cites “an internal dataset of 240 million images and a custom dataset of 6.4 million video clips.”

There is a trick in business

As Ars Technica has revealed, Gen-2 is currently in a closed testing phase, and creating these types of videos still requires some human help, evaluating images and achieving acceptable results. Even so, the resulting clip lasts only a few seconds.

In Artificial Summer, Privateisland.tv created clips, selected the best, added music and sound effects, and stitched the segments together into a series. That is, it is not completely created by an AI.

Both these human-made and human-assembled pieces demonstrate that generative AI still has a long way to go before it can autonomously dazzle people with society-changing memes.

There are still people behind the wheel of these extraterrestrial works, so, we can feel at peace … more or less.

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