Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
AI

AI Slop Ad Backfires For McDonald's (futurism.com) 56

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
McDonald's has pulled an AI-generated Christmas commercial from YouTube after viewers pushed back on what they called a distasteful, "AI slop"-filled take on the holidays. The 45-second ad, titled "It's the most terrible time of the year," was a satirical look at holiday chaos -- people tripping while carrying overloaded gift bags, getting tangled in lights, burning homemade cookies, starting kitchen fires -- and ended with a suggestion to ditch the madness and hide out at McDonald's until January.

The ad was created for McDonald's Netherlands by agency TBWA\NEBOKO and production company Sweetshop, whose Los Angeles-based directing duo Mark Potoka and Matt Spicer shot the film. After the backlash, Sweetshop said it used AI as a tool but emphasized human effort in shaping the final product. "We generated what felt like dailies -- thousands of takes -- then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production," the company said. "This wasn't an AI trick. It was a film."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

AI Slop Ad Backfires For McDonald's More

AI Slop Ad Backfires For McDonald's

Comments Filter:

  • The AI slop/backlash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ZERO1ZERO ( 948669 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @10:03AM (#65848353)
    The AI slop/backlash IS the advert. Noone would give 2 craps about an macdonalds advert normally, but make a shitty AI slop advert that you claim to have toiled over for months in underground sugar caves, and suddenly everyone is talking about it. This is a nothing burger of stealth advertising. Well done macdonalds. Also the actual advert it self regardless of AI is absolutely diabolical. It's a terrible, terrible advert AI or not. The message is really bad. It's a miserable, sad, defeatist advert. The irony is that visiting a macdonalds probably encapsulates all that is supposedly illustratively bad in the advert itself. Just say no.
    • You nailed it. This is native-advertising. So the "article" is an ad, which means the source is a spamblog. Is there any way to report submissions as spam? Because this is gross.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Right MCD is just looking over at KO and going us too.

      A few loud people online and embittered animators are complaining about their ads. That handful of people might be mad about it. Meanwhile in terms of numbers that matter everyone else going out of their way to watch the ads, like seeking them out, just to see what all the fuss is. So they get tons of free ad impressions, and if they are lucky a few of those people say "gee haven't had a Coke in while, sounds pretty good, maybe I'll buy a case."

      I haven'

      • MCD? KO? WTF are you talking about?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nadass ( 3963991 )
          MCD = McDonald's Corporation stock ticker symbol.
          KO = Coca-Cola Company's stock ticker symbol.

          And it's about the PR brouhaha of these companies' AI Sloppy adverts... in case you couldn't connect the dots.

    • In the same spirit as the commercial, here is another variant of the song: Most horrible time of the year [youtube.com]

      Trigger warning: horror, seafood.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by toddz ( 697874 )
      So get your 30 second 30 day window ad produced by <insert famous director/producer> at the cost of millions of dollars or we're going to flame you into submission. It's a completely forgettable seasonal ad, not a work of art to last throughout the decades people.

    • It's so bad, it's good.
      The medium is the message.
      I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
      I always thought big mac patties were made of worm castings.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      Same for Coca Cola. They had their "backlash" last year and their attention. They did the same this year. I wonder what they might do next year ...

      The interesting part of these ads seem to be that one can see how the quality increases outside of benchmarks and hobbyist's comparisons. In the Cola ad, you see how good someone can use these tools when they pay people with actual design experience to use them.
      You can steer recent AI pretty well, but an artist education helps you to know which direction you want

    • I see nothing wrong with the ad, sure its no masterpiece but most ads are not. For goodness sake we have infomercials, at least it was only 45 seconds of bullshit.

      Sometimes being bad is good for a commercial because it makes it memorable.

  • garbage in, garbage out (Score:4, Insightful)

    by v1 ( 525388 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @10:26AM (#65848413) Homepage Journal

    "We generated mountains of AI slop, and then spent countless hours turd-polishing and searching for clips that weren't completely terrible to bring you the best slop we could manage!"

    • Garbage in, Pyrite out (Score:5, Funny)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @11:11AM (#65848557) Homepage Journal

      Oh, so they're doing it the same way I take "good" photographs: by taking a fuckton of mostly-shitty photographs and trawling through them for the rare few which actually look decent.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      Some lazy ad firm clearly just wrote extended prompts in the vein of "draw a scene of a woman carrying christmas presents slipping in snow and falling over" etc and concatenated the least worst clips together. That was the extent of their effort.

    • "We generated mountains of AI slop, and then spent countless hours turd-polishing and searching for clips that weren't completely terrible to bring you the best slop we could manage!"

      It's more fundamental than that. The problem isn't that they generated AI slop and curated it, that's literally an aspect of creative processes. The real problem is that the final result still looks like AI slop.

  • It is not just the artificial "intelligence" that is becoming enshitified. The impact on the real thing is every bit as serious.

  • I quit eating at mcdonalds (Score:3)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @10:50AM (#65848493)
    When I had to pay too much for an egg mememuffin, never again will I go to that slop house

    • While I agree that the ad was awful, I don't get your take on McDonald's prices. That's the one thing they do have going for them.

      Where else are you going to get a egg and sausage muffin for under $5? Chick-Fil-A sells them for over $7.

  • LOL (Score:3)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @10:50AM (#65848495) Homepage

    Well, OK, apart from the gratuitous use of AI to make it, I think the commercial is quite subversive and funny. Also, it's clearly intended for the Dutch market, and quite a bit of Dutch humour is subversive and a bit rude.

    If they'd have made it without AI, I'd give it a 10/10 for creativity.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dskoll ( 99328 )

      And if you're wondering, "December kan wel een beetje McDonald's gebruiken" means "December could use a little McDonald's".

    • The problem is it looks like AI slop. It would be a perfectly fine advert if it didn't look like uncanny valley rubbish.

  • Meh. It seems like any other inoffensive ad.

    But, fuck AI and McDonald's. Amirite?

  • I despise McDonald's, I despise advertisers, and I'm very wary and mistrustful of so-called AI. That said, when I watched the commercial I laughed. I thought there were some clever bits, and I'd watch it again.

    I wonder if the negative response is akin to that of an otherwise-healthy immune system that has been faced with too many dire challenges in a short period of time and is over-reacting a bit. In this case that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

  • How is this not hilarious? I mean I know someone who's favorite Christmas Greeting is "Merry Bah-Humbug." But Still !!!

    ROTFLMAO (BBQ)

  • The fact that you're reading this means it didn't backfire.

    • That is completely false in 2025. There definitely is bad engagement these days. There's a reason they pulled the advert rather than let it run its course. I don't think anyone here reading this has a sudden urge to go get a BigMac. Simply having a name doesn't make marketing in any way affective or positive.

  • AI slop advertising RL slop. Sounds about right.

  • Mark Potoka and Matt Spicer shot the film.

    Did they, though? Did they actually shoot anything? Because ‘shooting’ implies a camera, and AI slop generators do not have cameras. If they’d shot the film, why would they “generate” their dailies?

  • I watched it and I don't really see how the AI/slop aspect would be what makes it a crappy advert. It's not great, but it's not what sinks the ad. I think it backfired because they come across as profiting from anti-christmas and anti-holiday frustration. Whether the holidays suck for you or not, having a commercial that's effectively saying they'd like to profit from your suffering is distasteful. I would also say that my stress level definitely doesn't go *down* when I walk into a McD's.

    • Agreed. Quality is quality, AI or not. If you hadn't told me it was AI-generated, I wouldn't have known. There's plenty of stuff like that out there, even before AI was a thing. Show me a funny / catchy ad made with AI, I don't care about the AI part of it.

  • I would not have known. Commercials don't have to follow the laws of physics. Stuff can happen in them that can't actually happen.

    With that said, I thought it was a good commercial. AI was used? And? AI is going to continued to be used all around our economy and in different ways. Hopefully our governments can figure it out with minimal suffering *lmao right*.

    If we are critiquing AI itself, I thought the commercial was just fine. Certainly good enough for a commercial.

  • We have artificial intelligence better than what was presented as science fiction for most of my life but a loud and vocal minority is displeased at the notion of a future where they do not gatekeep the creative process behind a combination of talent, nepotism and money. Pigs love slop because slop is delicious, I have been embracing the slop since DeepDream and I will continue to watch as the technology improves and the gatekeepers become irrelevant.
    • We have no such thing as artificial intelligence. We have LLMs. We have next token predictors, we have statistical image generators and fuzzy search. While occasionally helpful, it has not even a remote relation to intelligence, and sci-fi AI is still as sci-fi as ever.

      And who's gatekeeping here? Creatives produce content with GenAI and it's the public who lets them know that they hate it. I guess you could call the audience the ultimate gatekeepers, but that makes it sound unnecessarily conspiratorial. Peo

Slashdot Top Deals

"Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberrys!" -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Close