alt Hacker NewsIt seems like a statement from The Sweetshop, who made the ad, has also been pulled.
This piece links to a Futurism article[0], which in turn links to "an incredibly defensive statement"[1] from the ad agency.
> “For seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club [our in-house AI engine] working in lockstep with the directors,” Sweetshop’s CEO wrote.
(Sounds more like sweatshop than sweetshop, but I digress.)
However, that "defensive statement" link is broken, and I see no sign of it on the linked site, but I did find this older lamentation[2] from The Sweetshop regarding AI, or more specifically regarding the attitude that AI should allow you to cut costs and fire people.
> Being asked to cut 20–30% of creative costs and labour under the banner of ‘AI’ is unimaginative at best, and corrosive at worst. It drains the value of human creativity and concentrates it in fewer and fewer hands, hollowing out the very industry it claims to improve.
[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/mcdonalds-ai-ge...
[1] https://lbbonline.com/news/melanie-bridge-sweetshop-the-gard... (missing page, and the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy)
[2] https://lbbonline.com/news/Damn-The-Race-to-the-Bottom-AI-Sh...
Replies
How does this kind of work take 7 weeks for 10 people?
10 animators could hand-draw every frame of a 44 second ad in that time. They could spend an hour on each frame, completely trash and redo the entire commercial, take an extra week for meetings and rework, and still have time to spare.
The attempts by both this outfit and the one that did the Coke ad to walk the line of simultaneously touting what a labor saving device these models are while also trying desperately to make it seem like they did some actual work somewhere so they can also be respected as creatives is honestly hilarious.
Like I thought the whole point of these stupid things was that any John Q off the street could make awesome videos? If that's the case, then what in the utter hell is the point of a making of video featuring people playing at being creative?
Seems like one could have created a cheaper, higher quality ad with real actors.
Of course, real actors have unions and part of the point of AI is to make labor weaker.