- New ad campaign from Coca-Cola looks incorrect The non-existent works of JG Ballard have attributes to the author. The sections of text used in the ads are actually from various interview books published by the author several years after his death. This obvious error follows an earlier backlash against Coca-Cola’s AI-generated Christmas ads.
Coca-Cola’s recent AI-powered ads seem to confuse that fact. In an April campaign called “Classic,” the company aimed to highlight examples of its brand name appearing in classical literature. Ads use Stephen King Shine vs naipal’s House for Mr. Biswas As an example. However, it also includes books that are called Extreme metaphor JG Ballad, that does not exist.
What the ads seem to refer to is Extreme metaphors: Selected Interviews with JG Ballard 1967-2008this is a book about an interview with JG Ballard, published in 2012, three years after the author’s death, and edited by Dan O’Hara and Simon Sellars.
The ads show people entering aisles from Typewriter’s novels, but if Coca-Cola is mentioned, the company replaced the Typewriter font with its iconic red logo. With promotional images of shared ads At the media outlet, The company also shared an ock-laughed image of this page that appears to show JG Ballard as the author of Extremely sensitive.
“The sequence of words that are typed by the imaginary JG Ballad of the ads has never been written by him, and it has only been spoken, and I am the only person who enters that exact sequence in English,” said O’Hara, the book’s editor. 404Media‘s Emanuel Maibergwho first reported the error.
“The thing that made my eyes most enraged was the word “shangay” being typed. Ballard would never have mistakenly named the city in which he was born. Extremely sensitive And thank God, no: it is printed as Shanghai in the original text,” he added.
AI used in the “research stage”
VML, the marketing agency that collaborated with Coca-Cola to create the campaign, 404Media AI used “identifying books containing brand mentions in the first research phase,” but the company manually checked the facts and reached out to obtain permission from various authors, publishers and real estate.
O’Hara said he was concerned that the ads would misunderstand viewers that they believe the translation of Ballard’s words is in fact the author’s real prose.
“If you read the text in the ad, you’re not reading his prose. You’re reading mine and you’re translating his recorded words from French,” O’Hara said. 404. “I tried my best to render his meaning, but I managed to do that. My prose is a genuine, rather poor substitute. I see the ads and think there’s nothing special about the text that’s right.
Representatives of Coca-Cola and VML are luck By press time.
Coca-Cola’s AI backlash
This is not the first time Coca-Cola encountered a problem while using generated AI with ADS.
Late last year, the company released Christmas ads generated by a series of AI-related criticism online. Some artists, filmmakers and viewers have blown up ads as a cost-cutting move to replace creepy, low-quality, and creative labor.
Many artists and creatives have protested the use of AI in the creative industry, and claim that there is a risk of replacing human talent, and that AI models are trained in the work of creators without providing appropriate credit or compensation.
One of the ads aimed at paying homage to Coca-Cola’s classic 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” campaign was accused by social media users of “soulless” and “lack of actual creativity.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.
