Matt Wolfe critiques a widely-circulated McDonald's advertisement that was generated with AI and received heavy backlash. He describes the ad (people complaining about Christmas, staged misfortunes) and argues that audiences are fatigued by low-quality AI-generated content — especially when large, well-funded companies use it instead of hiring real actors and production teams.
There's been a new McDonald's ad circulating that you've probably seen or at least heard about. Now in this ad, it's a whole bunch of people talking about how they absolutely hate Christmas and can't wait for it to be over. And it's a bunch of people meeting misfortune, like getting thrown out of a window or their presents falling off their car. And the whole thing was AI generated and everybody hated it. Now here's my take. I think people have been so inundated with all of this, like, AI slop on social media. And we're getting to this point where almost every image or video you see, you have to wonder, is this real or is this AI? I can't tell anymore. I think that people, myself included, are so fatigued by seeing AI generated slop everywhere that when we see a company like McDonald's or Coca Cola go and generate more AI slop, but for their company, it just pisses us all off because it's like this is a multi, multi, multi billion dollar company with financial resources to do whatever they want. They can hire the best actors, they can hire a list actors to come and be in their commercials. They can hire the best visual effects people, the best musicians, the best voiceover artists. They have the capacity to do a high budget video. And so when we see them generating AI slop that sort of feels like all the other cheap AI slop that any individual can generate. We're like, why are you guys doing this? You don't have the financial excuse to, to be using AI to generate this stuff. Use real humans. Go pay people to do this stuff.
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