You can’t generate the holiday spirit with artificial intelligence — at least, according to social media.
On Nov. 12, the brand dropped its latest “Holidays Are Coming” commercial. Since 1995, the holiday-themed ads depict folks in snowy surroundings happily welcoming festive lights and a big rig full of ice-cold soda pop into town.
This year, though, some of the ads were made with generative AI.
One 30-second ad shows digital polar bears, deer and other animals scampering in the snow as computer-generated trucks, pine trees, bridges and even hot-air balloons are lit up with Christmas lights. People young and old in the ad all share smiles — as well as the fact that they aren’t real people.
A second, more animal-heavy ad imagines a place where polar bears, house cats, owls and monkeys exist in the same climate.
In addition to the commercials, Coca-Cola launched CreateRealMagic.com, which allows people to use AI to reimagine some of Coca‑Cola’s iconic holiday imagery and characters.
The site, which was first created in March, allows users to make digital greeting cards which can be downloaded, emailed to loved ones or posted to social media, save online galleries and browse through other AI-generated images.
As it ushers in the holiday season with this AI-heavy content, the brand has also opened itself up to quite a bit of criticism.
“Coca Cola using ai for an ad is genuinely so terrifying to me. Art is dying,” wrote one user on X. “Actors, replaced. Camera workers, replaced. Drivers, replaced. Designers, replaced. Soulless.”
“we’re living in the worst timeline,” added another.
“It shows how lifeless that Christmas commercial is,” one TikToker said. “It has no idea what the Christmas feeling is all about. It has no idea how to reproduce that type of joy that we get in the December season.
“It’s less festive, more creepy holiday vibes,” another TikToker said.
“Honestly the worst part is them saying ‘real magic’ at the end of the ad,” said another TikToker, adding that the ad “ruined Christmas and their entire brand.”
“AI is going to steal so many jobs, and a company like Coca-Cola actually using it and endorsing it is very bad for the rest of the world,” the same TikToker continued. “Why hire any animators or directors when you could type whatever you want into the real magic AI and get an entire commercial?”
A Coca-Cola spokesperson tells TODAY.com that this year’s holiday ads were crafted with a collaboration of human storytellers and the “power” of generative AI.
“Coca-Cola has long been at the cutting-edge of advertising, marketing and innovation, and we remain dedicated to creating the highest level of work at the intersection of human creativity and technological advancements,” the spokesperson says.
They also point out that the AI-generated ad is just one of the ads Coca-Cola plans on debuting this season, sharing a more traditional holiday ad called “Holiday Road,” which includes real actors and surroundings.
This isn’t the first time Coca-Cola has used generative AI in its advertising. In 2023, it released “Masterpiece,” a nearly two-minute commercial where paintings in a museum toss an ever-changing bottle of soda between framed artworks.
Coca-Cola is also far from the only brand to use generative AI in its advertising.
In June, Toys “R” Us drew online backlash for an AI commercial created using OpenAI’s text-to-video tool Sora. In response, Toys “R” Us Studios president Kim Miller Olko said the test was “successful.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
