Watch the AI-generated Christmas ad McDonald's pulled after massive backlash

midian182

midian182

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Facepalm: Companies that are excited about generative AI speeding up productivity – usually at the cost of human employees – often don't care about the public's opinion. But McDonald's just found out what happens when you ignore the general consensus. Its new AI-made Christmas ad has been pulled after being universally panned.

McDonald's Netherlands unwisely decided that an AI-generated ad would be a good idea to promote its Christmas campaign. It's pretty easy to spot the tell-tale signs that something was created by an AI, especially when it includes "real" people, as this 45-second ad does.

The ad itself revolves around the concept that Christmas is the "most terrible time of the year," ironically. It contains the usual awfulness you'd expect to see in these sorts of things: background characters with distorted faces, bizarre physics, and bodies that blend and twist into themselves. It's all quite Lovecraftian, frankly.

The Gardening.club, the AI division of The Sweetshop, which made the ad, defended it on LinkedIn. The team acknowledged that AI film divides opinion and that the ad is 100% AI-generated, but it also claims that the number of hours poured into the production was more than what would be required for a traditional ad.

"Just like a traditional shoot, the film needed a director, real storytelling instincts, and intentional casting, we selected and shaped each AI performer, their look, energy, and emotional presence, to meet the brief just as we would in live action film. It required virtual location scouting, solid references, screen tests, and a countless amount of takes to maintain true cinematic continuity," the post reads.

The Sweetshop's CEO, Melanie Bridge, said on Instagram that it took ten people five weeks of full-time work to create the ad.

Despite highlighting the amount of work that went into the clip, the overwhelming majority of people hate it. There's also been plenty of mockery over the claims that making the ad was so difficult. "If you're using A.I. to create something, then you didn't make anything," wrote one X user.

McDonalds Netherlands has now delisted the AI ad on YouTube, but plenty of social media users have re-posted it.

Even though we're used to this sort of response, companies keep pushing out AI content like this. Coca-Cola was slammed for its AI-generated holiday ad in 2024, but it still released two more AI-made ads for Christmas 2025.

As users raged against more AI slop, Pratik Thakar, head of generative AI at Coca-Cola, gave this less-than-diplomatic response: "The genie is out of the bottle," Thakar told The Hollywood Reporter, "and you're not going to put it back in."

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Watch the AI-generated Christmas ad McDonald's pulled after massive backlash

 
I quite like the AI ads, since they are so bad they're funny, as opposed to the incredibly boring safe for work corpo slow they were making before.
 
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but it also claims that the number of hours poured into the production was more than what would be required for a traditional ad.
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Hilarious.

They're successfully advertising that you get all the backlash, at no benefit. It's just the money that went to big tech now instead of a bunch of local actors and what not.
Quite the move, for an advertisement company.. advertising this heavily against using them.
 
:facepalm:

"Just like a traditional shoot, the film needed a director, real storytelling instincts, and intentional casting, we selected and shaped each AI performer, their look, energy, and emotional presence, to meet the brief just as we would in live action film. It required virtual location scouting, solid references, screen tests, and a countless amount of takes to maintain true cinematic continuity,"
Click to expand...
 
All the top brass AI push just shows how disconnected they are. Like Marie Antuanette’s “if they can’t afford bread they shall eat cookies”. We all know how that ended.
 
The level of pathetic was exactly what McDonalds was aiming for. Free marketing x2. This article is proof.
 
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Ok, took just as much time and had all the usual people as a standard ad. However, judging from the ad mistakes and reaction, they did not list one critical position. Who edited this? Or, more likely, Did they have an editor?
 
I doubt that anyone is actually annoyed by this ad. It is more entertaining than most ads. The fact that people can tell it was made by AI doesn't make it bad and doesn't make it worse than the bazillions I can tell are made by brain dead humans.
 
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They need to understand that people have AI shoved down their throats at work and worry about losing their jobs to AI. We certainly do not want to spend our leisure time with anything associated with AI.

It's a sensitive issue and I suggest companies stay away from it where practical.
 
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NyaAgain said:
I doubt that anyone is actually annoyed by this ad. It is more entertaining than most ads. The fact that people can tell it was made by AI doesn't make it bad and doesn't make it worse than the bazillions I can tell are made by brain dead humans.
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Lets see how you feel when you have AI shoved down your throat every day at work and see people lose their jobs to AI... Then you will care, in fact you will start to have a serious dislike for any company that does this.
 
whateversa said:
Lets see how you feel when you have AI shoved down your throat every day at work and see people lose their jobs to AI... Then you will care, in fact you will start to have a serious dislike for any company that does this.
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Why? The problem isn't with AI, it's with the world adapting to its use. At every step of the industrial revoluion, luddites went against the latest technologies. Yes, we no longer have lamplighters, and we no longer have people whose job is to clear horse manure off the streets. And sure, these people lost their jobs, and might have been annoyed with it. Did it make the world a worse place? No.
 
If done with care and by competent people that know what real life looks like, AI is amazing. And lets not gloss over the fact that this is low quality and still looks better than a 100 million dollar budget cgi marvel film. I would much rather have bad ai than bad cgi
 
whateversa said:
Lets see how you feel when you have AI shoved down your throat every day at work and see people lose their jobs to AI... Then you will care, in fact you will start to have a serious dislike for any company that does this.
Click to expand...
you mean like with the ads we already have? If you lose your job to AI, you must be really bad at your job.
Would you rather have cheap CGI that looks way worse?
 
If you think that ad was terrible you haven't seen the animated garbabe we are already getting trying to sell us dishwashing liquid and most other cleaners, and air fresheners. All so childish and obviously targetting the brain dead viewers.
 
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