Did you notice? This year's Coca-Cola Christmas advert is AI-generated

(Credit: Coca-Cola)

• 🤖 This year’s Coca-Cola Christmas advert is AI-generated

• 🎅 The company wanted to recreate its classic 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” ad

• 😬 However, the usual uncanny valley and issues with AI are present

• 🤷‍♂️ It begs the question why a company as rich as Coca-Cola needs to cheap out with AI

Apart from checking the calendar, one of the tell-tale signs that Santa is on his way is seeing the annual Christmas Coca-Cola advert arrive. But eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed something a little “off” with this year’s ad.

Yes, this year’s Coca-Cola Christmas advert has been made in AI. As reported by Forbes, the AI-generated video was made by three AI studios, Secret Level, Silverside AI and Wild Card. The companies created the new Coca-Cola ads using the generative AI models Leonardo, Luma, and Runway, as well as new model called Kling.

The AI-generated Coca-Cola Christmas advert aims to recreate the company’s classic 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” TV ad, and there’s definitely some odd looking moments. The humans that appear, in particular, don’t sit right and are only shown briefly to avoid further scrutiny.

The big red trucks’ wheels also seem to glide across the ground without spinning, and the hand that opens the Coca-Cole bottle at the beginning is a dead giveaway the ad was created using artificial intelligence. There’s also that cartoony, super-imposed look that AI currently has.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a company opt to create an AI-generated ad. Toy ‘R’ Us created an advert using OpenAI’s text-to-video tool, Sora, and it’s currently got 6,000 dislikes compared to 1.1k likes on YouTube.

It’s sad that a company that’s as rich as Coca-Cola would need to resort to AI for its annual Christmas advert, especially as it means hundreds of actual humans now won’t be paid for their acting, directing, lighting and other skills that would have been needed to create a real-life ad.

It also makes Coca-Cola’s “Tis the Season it’s always the real thing” tagline seem a little questionable, considering nothing is real about its new Christmas advert.

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Adam Vjestica is The Shortcut’s Senior Editor. Formerly TechRadar’s Gaming Hardware Editor, Adam has also worked at Nintendo of Europe as a Content Marketing Editor, where he helped launch the Nintendo Switch. Follow him on X @ItsMrProducts.