Advertising that you didn't use AI is definitely a thing now. But this is more likely a jab at the recent McDonalds ad, which did use AI, and which the agency who made the ad vigorously defended the use of AI (hilariously, by bragging about how many hours it took to make that ad).
The only mention of AI is the editorialized title in the HN submission, I don't see any mention at all in the ad or the video description. This ad does not appear to be a reaction to anything.
That’s hilarious. I had cursory familiarity with the McDonald’s situation but did not know thread agency aspect. I’d be very curious how many “hours” were spent minus the inference time.
I feel like there are subcultures that value "long hours and hard work" over "result".
If you can produce great things easily, then it is lazy. But if worked hours and hours including through Christmans, then it is great even if result is crap.
> vigorously defended the use of AI (hilariously, by bragging about how many hours it took to make that ad).
Likewise with the Coca Cola ad, the agency said in their defense that they had to sift through 70,000 video generations to assemble the few dozen shots in the final ad. And after all that sifting they still couldn't get the one element of continuity (the Coke truck) to look consistent from shot to shot, and had to manually composite over all of the Coke logos since the model kept mangling them.