For better or worse, Coca Cola has driven the iconography of Christmas — that jolly bearded fat man in a red suit is a corporate construct. Every year, Coca Cola proudly trots out some new heartwarming ad featuring Santa or a polar bear or whatever knocking back a frosty cold soft drink. Buy coke! They’ve been working hard for almost a century to make sure you associate this holiday with their beverage.
This year they blew it. They’ve aired an AI-generated ad that features trucks and an annoying jingle. Is this to be our new sentimental memory of Christmas?
One of the wealthiest companies in the world decided that they don’t need to pay artists to do their advertising artwork, and would instead have a computer churn over old imagery and cobble together an unappealing hash that won’t win over anyone. Take a look at the comments on that video — people hate it.
Actually, I never understood the association of a cold soft drink with Christmas. Wit hot summer days okay, but December on the Northern Hemisphere? I prefer hot chocolate or Scotch.
If Wikipedia is to be trusted ‘Father Christmas’ was, before the merging with Nicholas of Myra, depicted with a furred robe sometimes red but as in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol of 1843 sometimes illustrated in a green robe. St Nicholas should be banished back to 6th December and Sir Christemas welcomed back in some of his older forms.
I never associated any of them with to Coca Cola.
rietpluim; is port alright?
Port is perfect.
BTW, Saint Nicholas of Myra, whose name day is hugely celebrated in the Netherlands, is slowly loosing terrain to Santa Claus. We tend to adopt US customs at the expense of our own.
Cute animals, pity about the Coke trucks. Anyone who drives a car, hates trucks. How stupid do you have to be, not to know that?
Egg nog. Alcoholic or otherwise.
Here in Oz its often really hot and usually plenty of beer gets drunk too.
rietpluim; My mother was from Dusseldorf and after the war locals were surprised at the way the allies celebrated Christmas. Wie der Karneval! Certainly, Christmas is more American in Britain nowadays.
rietpluim. I forgot to say that my mother was badly frightened when he turned up on 6th December together with his (black) servant ready to beat bad children.
What PZ is accurately pointing at is the slow death of any true creativity.
New Dark Ages (are you getting tired of it or of me mentioning it?)
@submoron – Yes, children were taught that they’d be hit with the ‘roe’ (a bundle of branches) when they were bad, and in the worst case even put in a sack and shipped off to Spain, where St. Nicholas allegedly lives. It was considered pedagogical.
From the first scene, you could tell it was AI produced. The ice on the Coke machine gave it away.
Just a blatant ripoff from the beer company’s turf.
Fun from the Byrds (rock classic) ‘coke’
One of America’s great national pastimes is drinkin’ a Coke
Takin’ a smoke, tellin’ a joke
One of America’s great national pastimes is playin’ ball
Takin’ it all and thinkin’ so small
Ah, but the great taste of Coke has refreshed players
The hot and the tired, the weary and the sore
The great taste of Coke has refreshed players
The hot and the tired, the weary and the sore
One of America’s great national pastimes is chocolate fudge
Carryin’ a grudge, bribin’ the judge
One of America’s great national pastimes is poisonin’ rain
Acting insane, inflicting pain
REFRAIN
One of America’s great national pastimes is the worship of speed
Planting the seeds, takin’ more than she needs
One of America’s great national pastimes is cutting the grass
Grabbin’ some ass, living too fast
Sorry for the run together of the verses, wordpress formatting sucks. It obliterated my indentations. Not html compliant. Searched for, but can’t find clear markup info on wordpress.
Let me see if using non-breaking spaces enables indentation…
If this is indented, then it does.
nothing about that add says anything about the warm sentimental familial feelings that the much earlier adds managed to hit squarely on the head.
Yes it does point out that what they are interested in is the commercial aspects of the holidays both by the add itself which only congers up the urgency of the shopping experience and the use of AI to reduce cost by eliminating employees it does try to reflect a more general none religious expression but it is also kind of soulless and dead. a triumph of the MBA bottom line thinking.
@15: yeah, I’ve found that HTML entities work just fine. It’s possible that WordPress doesn’t understand them, but just passes them on to your browser.
The only HTML tags that seem to work are
<a href=…></a>for links,<b></b>for bold,<i></i>for italics,<code></code>to get a fixed-pitch font, and<blockquote></blockquote>for indented quoting of longer passages. In original posts on my own blog, I can use<sup></sup>(superscript),<sub></sub>(subscript),<img src=…>(insert an image), and<hr style=…>(horizontal rule); but none of those seem to work in comments. Sometimes analt=…parameter is required in an<img>tag.Aw, shucks – from the headline, I’d thought our esteemed host intended to return us to the cheery yuletide melodies of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.
A better playlist for HPLHS carols (enter at your own sanity’s risk).
I think that Coke commercial perfectly realizes the warmth and humanity of Christmas with carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, and caffeine.
My sediments exactly.
billseymour, PZ has massaged his blog .
A custom tag!
That ad featuring a convoy of driverless trucks invading the country and taking over the power grid is terrifying! Even the song is trying to warn us! “Watch out! Look around! Something’s comin’, comin’ to town!”
On the other hand, it’s not that different from the ’95 ad it’s trying to recreate, just a bit creepier.
Most of the logos seem to be fixes correcting whatever nonsense the AI dreamed up, but they forgot to fix the butchery of their own logo (twice) at 8 seconds. Later on, one of the fixes is wonky.
Still, if the laws of physics and biology are to be suspended, then geometry probably had already been interned.
Mathematics is OK because most trucks have an even number of wheels. One even has an even number of driver’s cabs.
@15 Steve Morrison tested: Let me see if using non-breaking spaces enables indentation…
If this is indented, then it does.
I reply: Thanks Steve, I use those when other methods don’t work.
@17 billseymour also tested html tags found some work, some don’t
I reply: Thanks bill, for the info. I’ve used the ‘href’ and ‘b’ tags here.
Sorry for the distractions from the orig. post.
But, just like any other system, we should be able to find and R.T.F.M. for wordpress,
I’ll just shut up, have a coke or three and fall into a diabetic coma to celebrate ‘the season’.
It is not like they even tried to use good AI to generate this piece of garbage. It is so obviously fake from the get-go it makes me want to claw my eyes out. For example, the polar bear’s skull does not stay the same shape from one frame to the next, it looks as if it were made from some wobbly jelly.
That is literally as good as AI gets for video right now. The thing is, it has no concept of “objects” or “continuity”, it’s just generating frames one at a time, pixel-by-pixel, with the previous frame as part of the input. The reason the polar bear’s skull changes shape is that the AI has no concept of any such thing. It’s not starting with a model of an object in space and then working out how that would appear from a given viewpoint as both it and the viewpoint moves, like a 3D rendering system would. There is no model of any kind.
This is also why none of the shots last more than 2 seconds – that’s pretty much the limit on how long AI can keep it even vaguely together for video at present.
Oh, and this will almost certainly be the hand-picked best bits out of several hundred hours of generated footage – and it’s been post-processed to fix the logos and stuff. Still probably cheaper than paying animators though.