What Happens When AI Tries to Generate a Pizza Commercial? (today.com) 61
The Today show's food reporter delivers a strange report on a viral AI-generated ad "for an imaginary pizza place called 'Pepperoni Hug Spot'."
Everything looks slightly ... off. Generated by AI, the audience is reminded constantly through the uncanny valley that the people aren't real — and neither is the pizza. "Cheese, pepperoni, vegetable, and more secret things," says the voiceover, which is also artificially generated... "Knock, knock, who's there? Pizza magic," the AI narrator says after a delivery driver (whose steering column is on the left side of his car) is shown delivering a pizza.
"Eat Pepperoni Hug Spot pizza. Your tummy say 'Thank you.' Your mouth say, 'Mmm,'" the ad continues while showing a trio of women eating pizza in the oddest possible fashion, complete with bizarre cheese pulls and facial contortions out of a food-based nightmare. "Pepperoni Hug Spot: Like family, but with more cheese..."
Using AI technologies Runway Gen2, Chat GPT4, Eleven Labs, Midjourney and Soundraw AI, the creator was able to produce the background music, voiceover, graphics, video and even generate the script for the ad. "I used Adobe After Effects to combine all the elements, adding title cards, transitions, and graphics," he adds... Seeing it spread, he whipped up a website that fit the uncanny vibe of the commercial and even created merch including hats and T-shirts.
"I figured I should capitalize on my 15 minutes of internet fame, right?" he jokes.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk "simply responded with an exploding head emoji."
And Pizza Hut's official Twitter account posted their reaction: "My heebies have been jeebied."
UPDATE: Saturday Pizza Hut Canada "transformed" one of its restaurants into the restaurant from the commercial, emblazoning the logo for Pepperoni Hug Spot onto its boxes, employee t-shirts, and the sign outside. There's two videos on the official Instagram feed for Pizza Hut Canada (which for the occasion changed its tagline to "Like family, but with more cheese.")
One video closes by promising the pizza does, indeed, contain "secret things."
Everything looks slightly ... off. Generated by AI, the audience is reminded constantly through the uncanny valley that the people aren't real — and neither is the pizza. "Cheese, pepperoni, vegetable, and more secret things," says the voiceover, which is also artificially generated... "Knock, knock, who's there? Pizza magic," the AI narrator says after a delivery driver (whose steering column is on the left side of his car) is shown delivering a pizza.
"Eat Pepperoni Hug Spot pizza. Your tummy say 'Thank you.' Your mouth say, 'Mmm,'" the ad continues while showing a trio of women eating pizza in the oddest possible fashion, complete with bizarre cheese pulls and facial contortions out of a food-based nightmare. "Pepperoni Hug Spot: Like family, but with more cheese..."
Using AI technologies Runway Gen2, Chat GPT4, Eleven Labs, Midjourney and Soundraw AI, the creator was able to produce the background music, voiceover, graphics, video and even generate the script for the ad. "I used Adobe After Effects to combine all the elements, adding title cards, transitions, and graphics," he adds... Seeing it spread, he whipped up a website that fit the uncanny vibe of the commercial and even created merch including hats and T-shirts.
"I figured I should capitalize on my 15 minutes of internet fame, right?" he jokes.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk "simply responded with an exploding head emoji."
And Pizza Hut's official Twitter account posted their reaction: "My heebies have been jeebied."
UPDATE: Saturday Pizza Hut Canada "transformed" one of its restaurants into the restaurant from the commercial, emblazoning the logo for Pepperoni Hug Spot onto its boxes, employee t-shirts, and the sign outside. There's two videos on the official Instagram feed for Pizza Hut Canada (which for the occasion changed its tagline to "Like family, but with more cheese.")
One video closes by promising the pizza does, indeed, contain "secret things."
So not entirely AI generated (Score:5, Informative)
A human edited various pieces together. Still 3 hours work is very light for making a project like this.
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Love the lady eating the plate.
Thanks, I missed that the first time as I was looking at her face. Vaguely reminds me of a cow and her cud.
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You can get way better results in 3 hours using stock footage. Still interesting of course.
I don't see it (Score:5, Insightful)
...uncanny vibe of the commercial...
Cursed pizza commercial generated by AI is terrifying the internet
I've watched it twice: it's not scary or terrifying. It's brain-dead, full of fake happiness and completely identical to all the other commercials I've ever seen in my life. All I see is a fucking stupid commercial, the likes of which I've been trying to escape or ignore for 5 decades.
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I honestly wonder if the reason your posts are so strange is that you live in a world surrounded by people who actually look like caricatures. It would start to explain a lot, firstly why you think this looks like any other normal advert.
Re:I don't see it (Score:5, Insightful)
Because all adverts are caricatures of real life. I've never seen a commercial in which the protagonists looked real or acted natural.
This AI creation feels just as artificial. I didn't say it looked natural, I said all the man-made commercials I've ever seen look equally fake.
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Sure, but in food commercials, they rarely eat the plate. Also the woman who apparently took WAY too much thorazine a few years ago and has the weird facial ticks to prove it, all of them victims of a third rate bargain plastic surgeon, etc.
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Because all adverts are caricatures of real life.
No one is talking about parallels of the advert to life. They are talking about the quality of the visual representation of people. What's wrong with you to think this advert is in any way normal or like any other advert?
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For all we know, he might be an AI.
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I?
Don't know...
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Yep, "fucking stupid commercial" was my take also. Also a bit of "does the VCR have some tears in the tape or what?"
If this is what "AI" can deliver, then the only thing it can do is increase the race to peak-stupid.
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You could probably make something that passes as a real commercial, but no one would notice. The unless the point of doing so was to see how well you could fool people, then making
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An AI isn't going to construct a sentence like "Your tummy say, 'Thank you'" because an AI won't even generate broken English like that without prompting.
You have way too much and entirely unjustified faith in this tech.
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It is very similar to other commercials indeed. But on top of the often ludicrous facade of human experience, that used to be fabricated by the ad industry, now it also has visual artifacts that you won't encounter in reality unless your perception is under the influence of psychedelic drugs. I would say that calling it uncanny and terrifying is fitting.
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I concur. The script was like something poorly translated from Mandarin, the video had some weird mouth-warping... but otherwise it looked an awful lot like a mediocre attempt at a quirky low budget ad. Nothing particularly special, which is special due to the novelty of how much of it was computer-generated.
It wouldn't take much cleanup by a real human to turn this into something you could use as a genuine advertisement... and apparently the people at Pizza Hut agreed.
I've seen this movie. (Score:3)
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By tricking the humans into eating its pizza.
there is no god (Score:5, Funny)
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Apparently that walking on the moon was not the monumental even some people took it for. People are still fucking stupid. I get that many people see in this "AI" something akin to themselves, because it also is fucking stupid.
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No, dogs, humans, and many (most) other animals are fucking stupid. The AI doesn't care that much about fucking.
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>We walked on the moon half a century ago and now this.
clearly, NASA had access to better AI than today's when it faked the moon landing . . .
[duck]
hawk
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Either the Moon landings were real, or else we faked them because we didn't have the technology to actually go there. The dichotomy must be maintained.
We can't let anyone imagine that aliens helped us fake the moon landings, because then people would ask why they would do that. If beings with interstellar transportation helped fake a trip from Earth to the Moon, it raises disturbing questions about what obvious evidence was so prolific on the Moon that they couldn't find a spot
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Is there any independent evidence of that provided by anyone other than NASA?
Re: there is no god (Score:2)
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Not if you're American, apparently. It blocks certain countries from reading the lyrics.
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Here's ChatGPT's translation:
Laa la lalaa, laa la lalaa
laa la lalaa laa lalaa laa laa.
I'm coming to tell you that you should eat pizza
and those who don't want to listen, let them decide for themselves.
A pizza is a round disk with cheese and lots of tomatoes
the bottom is made of cardboard, but nobody notices.
Chorus
Pizza pizza. Hoooo pizza.
Pizza pizza. Wait a moment... Pizza!
Laa la lalaa. Laa la lalaa.
Laa la lalaa laa lalaa laa laa.
I've tasted those things myself, well, I've regretted it.
I've sat on the toile
So American (Score:2)
It looks completely alien to me, but what I've got the most problems with is not the weird eating that's not quite there, but rather that it isn't what real pizza is like, even if Americans apparently believe it is.
This shows the consequences of bias in the training set.
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What do you think "real" pizza looks like? From what I've seen in Europe, Japan and Australia, most of the world thinks it looks like the American version: thick crust, often tomato sauce, uniform mozzarella(-like) cheese cover, lots of license for custom ingredients -- barbecue sauce instead of tomato sauce, bechamel for a white pizza, etc.
The US has shops that specialize in vera pizza napoletana, and meet the D.O.C. rules for it. In Rome? Not so much, at least 15 years ago -- they have their own styles
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Well, I live in Europe and I'd be very surprised to get thick crust pizza unless explicitly marked "American" or "Chicaco deep pan" or something like that. You can get them deep frozen right next to the thin crust ones too, but again, clearly marked.
You can get the American style just fine, usually from in chains specialising in that, but the default is Italian.
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"Well, I live in Europe and I'd be very surprised to get thick crust pizza unless explicitly marked "American" or "Chicaco deep pan" or something like that."
Ditto here, no pies.
Re: So American (Score:2)
In Germany I haven't even found deep pan pizza. Just doesn't exist
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And there's frozen pizzas from Wagner under the Big City brand that comes with thick and fluffy crusts as opposed to the otherwise usually thin and much denser crusts.
Dr. Oetker has is Big Americans brand that also comes with thick and fluffy crusts.
There you have three brand names that you can look up yourself if you're in doubt.
However I can add my anecdote and confirm that I don't remember having ever seen such p
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The Pizza hut might be a real deep pan pizza don't know, never seen a pizza hut, the two frozen ones are not, they are just thicc.
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It looks completely alien to me, but what I've got the most problems with is not the weird eating that's not quite there, but rather that it isn't what real pizza is like, even if Americans apparently believe it is.
This shows the consequences of bias in the training set.
Funny because while it is waaayyyy out of touch with cohesive reality as an American I thought it was amazing at associating aspects of both pizza and commercials and putting them together in novel ways that fit those aspects. Sure, it’s not enough on its own to actually fire all of the writers, actors, etc and create a proper commercial, but it definitely is capturing important elements of its training set and putting them together in a way that makes a kind of sense even if it’s a bit twisted
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Just in time for the Election Race (Score:2)
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Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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but in terms of creativity, they're just rehashing whatever it was trained on, creating literally nothing NEW.
The amount of “new” that humans create is minuscule and often nonexistent. You used no new words in your post, it’s not novel in any way, and it’s just rehashing what many have been saying for decades. Humans do the exact same thing these models do, even if the inner workings of the black box are different. It’s commonplace for an artist, for example, to say who influenced them when developing their own style and they don’t deviate much from the genera. They typical
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The term is so broadly used as to be meaningless. The "intelligence" doesn't actually UNDERSTAND anything.
it just spits out whatever it thinks is closest to what it was asked for.
You contradicted yourself at least three times in this diatribe. ;-)
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"Intelligent" is not the same as "creative". It's often the exact opposite. And the secret of good creative intelligence lies in how it filters the creative ideas against reality, and, yeah, we aren't there yet, but that doesn't describe all intelligence by any means...and it's often difficult to recognize when it shows up.
I'd say that "intelligence" was the ability to solve problems. And that ALL intelligence is limited. (That may well be provable from the definition I used. I think that you can show
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It's fun (Score:2)
Just had some fun with the prompt "Karl Lagerfeld eating a pizza" in Leonardo.ai, it's endless amusement, even if you don't make money with it.
Bring back Pizza the Hutt (Score:1)
Use AI to mash up Star Wars and Space Balls. Throw in Wizard of Oz while at it.
Hmm (Score:3)
He gets 15 minutes of fame for this? (Score:1)
Yeah, that sounds about right.
"Like family (Score:1)
ChatGPT says (Score:1)
driver deliver to house on lonely road quick quick (Score:2)
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Very good. You could easily get a job writing Chinese ad copy.
Everything looks slightly ... off. (Score:2)
Slightly off? This looks like something a person with severe mental issues made.
"secret things" (Score:2)
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Worked for Harland Sanders. [wikipedia.org]
Turing test (Score:2)
I have to say that advertisement passes the Turing test.
A true test of imitating a human isn't correctness, it's doing things half-assed or just plain WTF.
If you put this ad in with a bunch of other ads done by high-school students, how many people would guess this was the one done by a computer?
LR? (Score:2)
(whose steering column is on the left side of his car)
It's clearly on the right side of the car.