AI can already create convincing text and strikingly artistic images. But when it comes to commercials… it’s not there yet. But don’t take my word for it. Just have a look yourself:

When you get past the initial shock and you start thinking about it, the commercial actually makes sense. By that, I mean it makes sense because that’s probably how AIs see beer commercials. It’s got the hallmarks of many other such commercials: a large gathering, friends and a barbecue, music, all that. It checks all the boxes. The macro depiction of what should be happening is good. It’s just that everything else is uber-bizarre.

“This AI beer commercial looks exactly like how an alien intelligence would understand our beer commercials,” tweeted the video’s creator, Armand Domalewski.

We don’t really have any details about how exactly this ad was created. As far as we can tell, the ad is called “Synthetic Summer,” and first appeared on Instagram about a week ago. It was created by Helen Power and Chris Boyle from a London-based production company, probably using Runway’s new Gen-2 AI model. This AI model creates short clips much from a prompt (much like how other AIs create images from a prompt). Image-producing AIs are already well established, and video-generating AIs are already starting to pop up.

The videos come with already well-known shortcomings. Current AIs are notoriously bad at making human bodies, and this one is no exception. I mean, that’s not how you’re supposed to have a beer.

Still, with all its shortcomings and the overall creepy vibe the commercial gives, it’s getting a lot of things right, and it’s not hard to foresee a not-too-distant future when AI commercials really do become a thing. I mean, here’s a much better example of what AI can do. It’s still creepy, it’s still obviously fake, but it’s definitely more convincing.

At the end of the day, it wasn’t that long ago that image AIs were also very bad, and got very good seemingly overnight. The future of commercials may get pretty weird pretty fast.