Earlier this month, McDonald’s Netherlands put out an ugly and lifeless Christmas commercial that was created using AI generation tools. Over the weekend, after the ad spot went viral online for all the wrong reasons, the fast-food chain deleted it.
Recently, McDonald’s followed in the footsteps of Coca-Cola and released a new AI-generated advertisement just in time for the holiday season. The ad features numerous AI-generated scenes of people dealing with all the horrible, annoying, and not-so-great moments that can happen during this time of year. It’s genuinely a funny little idea for an ad, but it’s hard to watch and enjoy when it’s so clearly AI-generated.
This is normally the part where I’d embed the ad via an official source, like the McDonald’s YouTube account. But, as spotted by Futurism, I can’t do that because the fast food company has seemingly removed it entirely from the internet, a step it took after previously shutting down comments on the ad. So here’s a reupload of it via the YouTube channel CongenAI:
Perhaps the wildest part of all of this is that the studio behind the awful-looking AI ad claimed that it crunched for weeks to produce this slop. Seriously. Here’s the full statement from the studio, Sweetshop, which has also since been deleted:
“For seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club working in lockstep with the directors. Every shot travelled through a rigorously engineered toolchain: real Google Earth plates, advanced style-transfer, pixel-level photo repair, custom LoRAs, control nets, bespoke ComfyUI graphs, and thousands upon thousands of tightly steered iterations.
Then came compositing, lighting balance, physics corrections, artefact removal, and final finishing in Flame. We generated what felt like dailies – thousands of takes – then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production. This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film. And here’s the thing I wish more people understood: magic isn’t the technology. The magic is the team behind it, people who pushed, questioned, experimented, swore at broken models, solved impossible problems, and refused to stop until every frame felt cinematic.
I don’t see this spot as a novelty or a cute seasonal experiment. To me, it’s evidence of something much bigger: that when craft and technology meet with intention, they can create work that feels genuinely cinematic. So no – AI didn’t make this film. We did.”
Personally, I think it would be easier and better to just have a camera crew and a director film some actors, maybe add some stock footage in, and not make something horrible in a way that sounds both tedious and terrible. But I’m just old-fashioned like that, I guess.
