McDonald's removes AI-generated ad after backlash

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/11/mcdonalds-removes-ai-generated-christmas-ad-advert-backlash

by terabytest • 7 months ago

27 39 7 months ago

Insanity• 7 months ago

I can sympathize but the comment that “This commercial single-handedly ruined my Christmas spirit” is insane to me. Who cares so much about advertisements lol.

welferkj2• 7 months ago

I owe my life and my diabetes to this corporation. It is extremely important to me that it reflects my values and prejudices.

dvh• 7 months ago

The outrage is the AD

lm284692• 7 months ago

Like it or not advertisement shapes the world in a lot of ways. I still remember ads from back when I was a kid about eating clean, not littering, &c.

It is, or used to be at least, one of the most creative visual industry too, because of relatively big budgets, short duration, fast release cycles.

duskdozer4• 7 months ago

At this point, seeing any advertisement ruins my mood.

monadgonad• 7 months ago

I think it is humorous exaggeration

fullshark• 7 months ago

People on social media are not known for being so even keeled and nuanced

A_D_E_P_T2• 7 months ago

AI is deeply unpopular with a large and very vocal fraction of the population. It's reflexively just "slop" to them. (And, on Twitter, I keep seeing people praise content, learn it was AI-generated, and immediately pivot to outrage.) As such, it's reputationally risky for brands to use AI-generated resources in any public-facing project, and this situation is unlikely to change any time soon. Marketing managers need to realize this.

theshrike792• 7 months ago

And it's a "when you see it you can't unsee it" type of thing, like motion smoothing in TV.

If you don't know it can be better, you're fine with it. But when someone shows you the proper stuff, you can't stand the other shit.

sothatsit2• 7 months ago

It’s easy to be against it now because so much content that people recognise as AI is also just bad. If professionals can start to use it to produce content that is actually good, I think opinions will shift.

exegete• 7 months ago

If AI is at the point then the consumer wouldn’t know or care if it was AI generated.

internet_points2• 7 months ago

It's not just a reflex, it's disappointment

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art said it better than I ever could

duskdozer4• 7 months ago

Well said! "It's not just a reflex, it's disappointment" isn't just a pithy turn of phrase--it's a *new paradigm* of English language phraseology.

theshrike792• 7 months ago

Which one? From what I can see EVERY holiday ad by them during this season has been complete AI slop.

aldarisbm• 7 months ago

When GenAI start coming through with chatgpt, I was hoping it would take away the every day menial tasks.

I now see that is mainly targeting Creative Work, and it's really really sad.

I think we as humans find joy in creative work and it is frustrating that we as a collective decided that is the thing we will take away from humans.

welferkj2• 7 months ago

I find joy in creative work. I don't see this as a valid excuse to spew hatred against how others choose to engage in creative work.

illwrks2• 7 months ago

The real issue with these tools is taste. Most business people/clients have poor taste and they need creatives or engineers etc to actually rein them in, then produce the great work they need, gained through years of experience, and taste refinement .

The AI tools can produce the work, the quality can be good but taste is lost as the professionals are removed from the process.

There’s a quote I can’t remember the source of… “anyone can have an idea but not everyone can execute on it.” AI gives the illusion you can create your ideas and compete with actual professionals

lukeasrodgers• 7 months ago

The ad is hilariously bad but McDonald’s has done many terrible ads over the years where “creatives” were involved eg the infamous random red couch ad.

illwrks2• 7 months ago

True! At the end of the day the client has money to spend, and an agency can help them do that to infinity regardless of the output.

ourmandave• 7 months ago

It looked like the preview to an upcoming horror movie. Flash through a bunch of scenes where the world is suddenly bizarre and everyone is acting strange.

nickjj• 7 months ago

It's surprising to me at how hard companies are pushing AI when it's in such a poor usability state.

I was trying to sign up my step dad to SiriusXM (he wanted it) so I called their phone number. The first interaction with the company is them saying you are speaking to an AI and to ask what I'm trying to do. So I said something like "I'd like to sign up for a new account but have a question about the promotional price". It said it couldn't understand the request and I had to repeat things a few times until it gave up and sent me to a human where the question was resolved quickly but it took minutes to reach a human.

It's wild to me that companies are putting AI at the top of their sales funnel.

zaptrem• 7 months ago

This sounds like the same basic voice systems we’ve had for 15 years. Idk if that counts as modern “AI”

coffeefirst• 7 months ago

The modern AI phone support systems I’ve encountered aren’t able to do anything or go off script, so it sounds better but it’s still a lousy experience.

duskdozer4• 7 months ago

I'd bet there's some calculation that people who try to sign up for a plan over the phone end up using the phone more down the line, which would mean more costly operator time. So the math works out where the overall savings of making enough people give up before reaching a human outweighs the cost of potentially lost new subscriptions by phone call. Or, they just didn't study that. Or, the decision-makers don't contact customer support for themselves and so don't know how infuriatingly unhelpful AI ones are.

HWR_14• 7 months ago

Or the decision maker put "replaced 50% of call workers with AI" on their resume and got a new job instead of measuring the results.

palmotea• 7 months ago

I'd bet there's some calculation that people who try to sign up for a plan over the phone end up using the phone more down the line, which would mean more costly operator time. So the math works out where the overall savings of making enough people give up before reaching a human outweighs the cost of potentially lost new subscriptions by phone call.

That's an example of a weird heuristic I frequently see applied to corporations: assume some awful decision is the result of some scarily hyper-competent design process, and construct a speculative explanation along those lines.

But must of us have worked in corporations, an know how stupid and incompetent they can be.

Or, they just didn't study that. Or, the decision-makers don't contact customer support for themselves and so don't know how infuriatingly unhelpful AI ones are.

Occam's razor points to this as the reason.

martypitt• 7 months ago

... the company which made the ad, defended its use of AI in a post on LinkedIn
“It’s never about replacing craft, it’s about expanding the toolbox. The vision, the taste, the leadership … that will always be human,” she said.
“And here’s the part people don’t see: the hours that went into this job far exceeded a traditional shoot. Ten people, five weeks, full-time.”

That response sounds like it was written by ChatGPT, which is a fantastic piece of tone-deaf irony from the creators.

lm284692• 7 months ago

Compare that to Intermarché's christmas ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na9VmMNJvsA

Beautiful visuals, beautiful story telling, an actual message... ads can be more than "consume our shit"

ciupicri• 7 months ago

Are you seriously comparing a half minute ad with something that's five times longer at two minutes and half? Way too expensive for tv and way too long anyway. I think it's longer than the average TikTok video.

francoispiquard• 7 months ago

The fact that we are talking about it here (and offline - had that discussion with a colleague) means that they are getting what they want --> attention

It's lame but it works

itsdrewmiller• 7 months ago

Haha yes, we are to believe they made an AI ad with the message “Fuck Christmas” and they are totally shocked by the backlash.

polycaster• 7 months ago

However, we notice – based on the social comments and international media coverage - that for many guests this period is 'the most wonderful time of the year'.

Cringe. I suspect the same people who needed social comments and international media coverage to figure out that Christmas might actually be a nice time for some people are the ones who decided that video was appropriate in content and aesthetics. Also, that quote reads a bit like a machine desperately trying to understand humans.

tyleo• 7 months ago

I always wonder about the truth in, “No advertising is bad advertising.” I think you can have bad advertising that isolates customers but this doesn’t seem to cross that line. We’re all talking about McDonalds now after all.

It reminds me of Apple’s Crush! commercial: https://adage.com/video/crush-ipad-pro-apple/

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46217176

fortyseven• 7 months ago

And here I am thinking it was just a goofy lark that I got a minor chuckle out of. No, apparently it's a major bit of drama for people. Geesh.

McDonald's removes AI-generated ad after backlash

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