OpenAI, the giant behind ChatGPT, just dropped a $14-million Super Bowl ad extolling the virtues of AI tech and positioning it as one of the greatest inventions in human history. But—shockingly—none of the content that appears in the 60-second spot was actually made by AI.
In OpenAI’s defense, the company did rely on its text-to-video AI model Sora in the concepting stage for the ad, but the final animation itself was entirely crafted by humans.
“This is a celebration of human creativity and an extension of human creativity,” OpenAI Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch told The Verge.
The ad, which features a slick aesthetic that I can only define as digital minimalism, traces some of the biggest moments in human progress from the discovery of fire to the moon landing, eventually arriving at the internet and—you guessed it—ChatGPT.
Still, it’s not all that surprising that OpenAI relied on humans for the final spot.
Despite the fast progression in generative AI tech, the outcomes—especially when it comes to video and animation—still exhibit unsettling, mildly uncanny characteristics. It’s all in the little details: jerky movements, bizarre psychedelic-like textures and other such oddities. Just look at the AI deepfake French President Emmanuel Macron just posted.
The ad premieres amidst the publishing of a new blog post from Sam Altman in which the OpenAI CEO predicts the use of AI will grow exponentially in the future due to swift decreases in costs—about ten times lower every 12 months for a “given level of AI.”
In the essay, Altman further posits that AI should significantly improve living conditions for humans, but adds that distributing AI’s benefits equally among people might require some human ingenuity.
“The historical impact of technological progress suggests that most of the metrics we care about (health outcomes, economic prosperity, etc.) get better on average and over the long-term,” he elaborates, “but increasing equality does not seem technologically determined and getting this right may require new ideas.”
AI was in the spotlight big time in this year’s Super Bowl. Google ran an AI-themed Super Bowl campaign around its own Gemini model showcasing how it can help small businesses.
Unfortunately, the effort backfired due to a now-corrected statistic that placed Gouda cheese as one of the world’s most consumed. The statistic was fed by Gemini itself, which is somewhat ironic. You’d think this is precisely the kind of thing that AI woulda, Gouda, shoulda caught—but it didn’t.
Yes, I know that was a terrible pun. I wish I could blame it on AI.
