3 viral AI-generated TV commercials that will haunt your nightmares

ChatGPT is easily the most discussed tech advancement of the year so far, but things are slowly getting out of hand. The “Godfather of AI” might be right to give up his Google AI work to advocate against the dangers of AI. One of his immediate worries isn’t that AI will take over the world in a post-apocalyptic Terminator-like future. However, we might not know what to trust online as AI becomes even better at generating news, images, and videos. It’s not quite there yet when it comes to videos, thankfully, as the following AI-generated TV commercials prove.

The three TV ads are impressive, no matter how horrific they might look.

Generative AI is getting better and better at creating images that look like genuine photos. That’s an amazing accomplishment for the software but also a troubling development. It’s easy to see how malicious individuals will abuse such features.

Thankfully, video quality from generative AI products isn’t on par with the images. That’s why the AI commercials you’re about to see are so disturbing. They contain text, voiceover, and moving people who aren’t real. The people don’t even look like humans from Earth. And the AI’s inability to create videos of them is somewhat hilarious.

But these AI ads are going viral online, generating plenty of views on YouTube.

The first AI commercial reached nearly 540,000 views on YouTube. The Pepperoni Hug Spot clip is entirely AI, according to its creator, Pizza Later. We’re looking at a script that ChatGPT-4 made, according to DIYPhotography.

Other AI tools include Midjourney for images, Runway Gen2 for video, Eleven Labs for voiceover, and Soundraw AI Music for music. The creator then used After Effects to put this together:

The next AI commercial that will haunt your nightmares is from Private Island. They used Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and ControlNet to make this commercial about beer. Or is it about partying while the world ends around you?

Whatever the case, the humans in it are incredibly scary. Still, the clip toped 253,000 views on YouTube.

Maybe the scariest of them all is the last AI-made TV commercial that follows. It has only about 126,000 views on YouTube, and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. More people should see this abomination of Will Smith eating spaghetti over and over. You can’t unsee it once you’ve witnessed it. And you’ll understand why AI is both incredibly amazing and terrifying.

The creator used Stable Diffusion for the images and video and ElevenLabs for voices. Here’s the hellish result:

We’ll likely see more AI commercials in the future, and more of them will deliver the same nightmare experience. But it’s only a matter of time before AI will create flawless TV ads.