![\"McDonald's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/mcdonalds-ai-generated-commercial.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\tAI Generated Video via McDonald’s<\/p>\n
Thanks to the rise in popularity of generative AI, mainstream companies like Coca-Cola<\/a> and Google<\/a> are jumping on the bandwagon to plop out new advertisements. There\u2019s just one issue: pretty much everybody hates it.<\/p>\n This year, McDonald\u2019s decided to get in on the corporate slopfest with a 45-second Christmas spot cooked up for its Netherlands division by the ad agency TBWA\\Neboko. The entire thing is AI, and revolves around the thesis that the holiday season is the \u201cmost terrible time of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n Humbug aside, the ad assaults the viewer with rapidly-changing scenes played out in AI\u2019s typically nauseating fashion. Because most videos generated with AI tend to lose continuity after a handful of seconds, short and rapidly-changing scenes have become one of the key tells<\/a> that the clip you\u2019re watching is AI.<\/p>\n Similar to Coke\u2019s 2025 Holiday ad<\/a>, the McDonald\u2019s spot is like a visual seizure, full of grotesque characters, horrible color grading, and hackneyed AI approximations of basic physics. <\/p>\n Though the abomination of an ad only has 20,000 views on YouTube, backlash in the comments was so intense that McDonald\u2019s shut down comments over the weekend, before delisting the video entirely. (Some marketing research databases managed to scrape the clip<\/a>, if you\u2019re curious.) <\/p>\n \u201cThe future is here, and it\u2019s not looking good,\u201d one poster mused under an aggregator account<\/a> on Instagram. \u201cSo a company with that amount of resources couldn\u2019t create a full production with a big team of people to work together and create something actually worth while?\u201d asked another. \u201cBrilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n Following the outcry, The Sweetshop \u2014 the production company hired by TBWA\\Neboko to create the ad \u2014 released an incredibly defensive statement<\/a> justifying their work.<\/p>\n \u201cFor seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club [our in-house AI engine] working in lockstep with the directors,\u201d Sweetshop\u2019s CEO wrote.<\/p>\n Sweetshop even went so far as to argue that the amount of labor hours wasted cleaning up AI hallucinations justified the horrible end product.<\/p>\n \u201cWe generated what felt like dailies \u2014 thousands of takes \u2014 then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production,\u201d they said. \u201cThis wasn\u2019t an AI trick. It was a film.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t see this spot as a novelty or a cute seasonal experiment,\u201d the CEO continued. \u201cTo me, it\u2019s evidence of something much bigger: that when craft and technology meet with intention, they can create work that feels genuinely cinematic. So no \u2013 AI didn\u2019t make this film. We did.\u201d<\/p>\n Though this seems to be McDonald\u2019s first AI commercial, it isn\u2019t the corporation\u2019s first brush wish the tech. Back in March when the Studio Ghibli AI pictures were all the rage thanks to ChatGPT, McDonald\u2019s Mexico<\/a> jumped on the trend, posting AI memes on its social media accounts. (Those didn\u2019t fare much better<\/a>.)<\/p>\n So while the contractors behind the campaign seem content to pat themselves on the back, the public sentiment seems clear: if we have to be constantly blasted with obnoxious ads, they could at least be made by a human.<\/p>\n More on fast food: Taco Bell\u2019s Attempt to Replace Drive-Thru Employees With AI Is Not Going Well<\/a><\/p>\n \t