The Guide #178: How AI took over the commercial break

The Guide doesn’t tend to focus on adverts very often. We’re usually more interested in the popular culture those commercials are busy rudely interrupting. Besides, complaining about the most annoying ones – like

the Confused.com ad

where a succession of people squeeze the mouths into a disgusting O-shape and mime whistling for reasons unknown – only affords them the attention they crave. My primary life ambition is to live in a world where they stop making the Domino-hoo-hoo ads, so I’m hoping that ignoring them may help make that utopia a reality.

Still, sometimes it is worth paying attention in the ad breaks. After all, the best examples –

Ridley Scott’s 1984-riffing Apple spot

, say, or

Jonathan Glazer’s Guinness ad

– elevate the form to something close to art. Great ads tend to linger in the collective imagination, serving as shorthand for the era they belong to. Even when the ads aren’t coming close to doing that, they can still tell us something interesting about what messages our capitalist overlords are trying to get us to swallow. And if you have been paying attention to ad breaks over the past few months, you’ll likely have noticed a recurring message: artificial intelligence, far from being the thing that will ultimately turn society in to a giant pool of

grey goo

, is actually your friend.

This trend seemed to kick off over Christmas, when I kept being assailed by a podcast ad for Google’s AI Gemini chatbot (it doesn’t seem to be online, so you’ll have to take my word for it). A generic bloke asks his phone “how do you think my football team will get on this season?” and gets an answer so vague and uninformed it might have been

crafted by Armando Iannucci

. Around the same time, a better, if more sinister, example was the

very entertaining Apple ad

where an office drone writes a screed to the co-worker who pinched his pudding from the company fridge, and then uses his MacBook’s AI writing tool to moderate his tone. And there was a Matthew McConaughey-Woody Harrelson ad for Salesforce that suggested AI’s main asset would be in preventing people from

buying lurid fluffy hats

.

AI’s real coming out party though was during last weekend’s Super Bowl, that rare occasion where people actively watch adverts rather than run a mile from them. America’s biggest sporting event, with its notoriously pricey commercial real estate, has always been a vital proving ground for campaigns, a place where the right ad at the right time might produce something

zeitgeist-capturing

, but where a misjudged spot might prove

company-endingly disastrous

. And every so often a theme takes over these Super Bowl ads: in 2000 it was

dotcom companies

(mere months before the bottom fell out of the whole sector); and three years ago it was

cryptocurrency

, hawked by celebs who

definitely

knew what they were talking about.

This time it was AI that celebs seemed to be hawking. McConaughey and Harrelson were back, taking over Heathrow airport for another knockabout affair, while Meta and Ray-Ban recruited two Chrises (Hemsworth and Pratt) and one Kris (Jenner) for an

entertaining ad

riffing on Maurizio Cattelan’s notorious

duct-taped banana artwork

. Meanwhile, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, eschewed celebs for an ambitious animated ad that positioned AI in the lineage of world-shaking developments. And, Google had another Gemini ad,

this time for the other football

, with a clueless boyfriend trying to impress his girlfriend’s family by getting AI to teach him some basic gridiron phrases (not unlike that Armando Iannucci sketch). It was part of a huge advertising push by Google for its AI-enabled products, with

ads showing the quotidian ways

AI can assist everyday folk – although their earlier advert where, thanks to AI, the popularity of gouda cheese

was wildly overstated

, was sensibly nowhere to be seen.

Even if you aren’t a complete AI catastrophiser, something still feels a little off about how loudly these companies are using these ads to insist that AI is only here to help. There was no promise of a bold new future, no glowing athlete hurling a giant hammer at Big Brother. Instead, with the bold exception of OpenAI’s ad – which at least seemed to be owning the society-altering implications of its product – every ad here seemed to be downplaying AI’s significance: it’s just here to sell cheese, not take over the world. And that makes sense, since

polling suggests

that Americans think more harm than good will come from AI. (In the UK,

polling around AI is more positive

, but still decidedly mixed.) This ad splurge felt less about enticing consumers with a glitzy new product than doing reputation management on something that, like it or not, people will have to start using soon.

Much of this reputation management was being done via likable A-listers, which had an irony to it, given that no group of workers

has been more vocal

than actors about the threat AI poses to their livelihoods. Right as the Chrises, McConaughey and co were trumpeting the benefits of AI, their union Sag-Aftra was

fighting for video game voice actors

, who have been on strike since July over the use of generative AI in the gaming industry. And

AI has inserted itself into this year’s Oscar race

, too.

Similar tensions are already being felt, or soon will be, across practically every other industry –

including, of course, advertising

. Most people have their eyes open about AI, recognising its life-changing benefits as well as its pitfalls. But ads trying to minimise or even cutesify this most disruptive of industries is only going to irritate people – almost as much as hearing Domino-hoo-hoo.

If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter

please subscribe

to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday