McDonald's AI Christmas Ad Pulled After Massive Backlash

0:00All right, welcome back to Denoise. In this episode, we're gonna talk about the new open AI Disney deal, the McDonald's AI commercial that was a fail and a couple of the other updates. you ready Addy let's get into it all right welcome back good to see you again Addy good to see you too Joey so yeah as we were kind of running down this briefing I think there's stuff here that was news to you as well so this will be I am gonna be reacting live to the audience in a very authentic way it'll be a journey all right the first story because we should talk about this now because it's already kind of gone came and went was another AI ad from McDonald's Netherlands and uh it got so much backlash that they pulled the ad really yeah it's that ai spoiler alert well you know what i've i got some i got some thoughts about about this in general but here let me uh because you haven't seen the ad so let me uh play it on uh twitter which is still kept it up let me it's the most terrible time of the year all the shots turned to mayhem even center And the tree redecorated your place It's the most terrible time of the year The roast ain't a chunk And the cookies burn too Frickin' chaos, it feels like a zoo It's the most terrible time of the year So you'll leap from the madness The lights and the cheer and hide out in mcdonald's till january's here all right uh where do i start so that is yeah yeah i mean my general thoughts my songs was like it's just a terrible ad it's just a terrible okay that's exactly what i was gonna say it's a terrible message the world is going through a lot right now this is the last negative ad that we need as we go into the holiday season yeah i mean this is sort of like the time of just like fun and cheer and hope and like take it easy and you know get a break at the end of the year who wants to hear an ad about the most terrible time of year like and also it's so not on brand for mcdonald's because they are they are not generally playing in this risky adverse area of uh brand messaging they're they're very safe right they've been around forever it's ronald mcdonald and like a lot of happy stuff yeah and like i mean the the mcdonald's in this ad is supposed to be the respite from the christmas chaos and go hide out at mcdonald's until january but that's like the wrong position yeah no that is and i was trying to nitpick like the ai part of it and honestly the ai generations look good they're edited and cut together the sound design's great yeah and this is a concept that would be i'm gonna guess you know too expensive to like practically shut down a street and have santa like with actual reindeer you know in the road and yeah it's not it's one of those things where it's like when you tell people it's ai it just triggers everyone and yeah i think when this plays on tv and people see it like they're not going to blink twice the ad itself is bad it's a terrible message but the production quality is whatever yeah it just yeah i happen to have sucked in that negative energy i mean i think has gone yeah yeah ai was the cherry on top that just gave you know everyone with their pitchforks even more reason to you know revolt against this but obviously it's a terrible ad and it's made with they i get yeah which is just like i got the flame torch so yeah they um i think that launched when that launched monday or tuesday and then yesterday mcdonald's yeah it's so not on their brand like i i mean i mean i both grew up on mcdonald's right like yeah they're in like the same kind of i would put them in the same category as like coca-cola of just like you know this whole ford or walmart like they're very safe it's a safe all-american wholesome brand now this is mcdonald's netherlands i don't know how their corporate structure is and how much autonomy they have but obviously no one picks up on that it's mcdonald's and mcdonald's mcdonald's whoever directed that ad needs like a deal with shutter the horror streaming channel or something somebody really wicked over there they need to work in a different genre i don't know what studio was i mean the other quote people latched on to was them saying that they hardly slept for weeks while writing AI prompts and refining the shots.

4:22AI didn't make this film, we did. I think people latched onto that line too when they grabbed their pitchforks. Yeah, I could actually see the amount of time consumption that goes into each of these generations. I'm playing around with some stuff now on the video. I mean, you're literally waiting, even if you're running multiple things, you're waiting minutes, hours go by, and before you know it, your whole day's gone by. So this is quite a lot of shots, and the quality is pretty good. you know putting the creative side of course and yeah i mean we know it you know people like are making fun of the ai didn't make this film we did and hardly slept writing ai prompts refining the shots yeah it does take a lot of work to do these you know it's not just put a prompt in a box and poof you get an ad but in this case you got they got a bad okay well thanks for bringing it up yeah one thing what did mike mcdonald's say uh mcdonald's netherlands removed the video adding in a statement that the moment served as an important learning as the company explored quote the effective use of ai oh my god they didn't get it at all no it's not an ai issue i would say it's a secondary ai issue in that it's so easy to generate bad content that you still blame ai for making it do the thing that you would just doing it feels like um yeah it feels like uh uh jeff goldblum jurassic park like you know no everyone wanted to know if you could no one stopped to ask like if you should if you should yes we can't make this concept super fast and easy should we exactly yeah i thought you were gonna say uh life finds a way as in bad content that's what bad content will always find a way we don't need we don't need ai for that no all right next up this one just broke this morning as we're recording it disney and open ai have announced a partnership disney's going to invest 100 not sure they wish it was 100 billion disney's going disney's going to invest 1 billion dollars uh in open ai and it is part of a three-year licensing agreement where sora will be able to use disney and all of the disney universe characters uh in Sora videos.

6:31So memes? Like Sora app? Yeah. So there's a couple of things to this. People will be able to generate, use Disney characters in Sora-generated videos. Okay. And then there's some link where some of these videos have the chance to then play on Disney+. Which that is not surprising because in Disney's, whatever, Ernie's report, they, Iger mentioned something that they were exploring. consumer-generated AI content appearing in Disney+. So this is probably, this is part of what that meant. But the things I'm a little fuzzy on, you can run Sora as a consumer. You can call up Disney characters. It's not clear if you can use the Cameo function because we had talked about when Cameo first came out where it'd be like, oh, this would be a great use if they license IP from other studios and you can be in a Marvel film with Iron Man or you can be whatever.

7:28in Frozen or Encanto or something. That's not clear. That's not quite clear from the statement if you'll be able to put yourself in these or if this is more like some sort of elevated fan fiction where you can kind of just make your own episodics using Disney characters. It's an interesting avenue for them to go down on. I see where you're like a use GC, choose your adventure type thing with Disney IP, perhaps using Sora Engine. I was just thinking the most sort of rational thing, which would be if OpenAI could custom develop video and image generation technology or even audio technology for Disney productions.

8:05Is that part of any of this? I don't think it's part of the public part, but it was part, it seemed under reading between the lines. I can't find the exact line, but it was something to the effect of like, they're not just investing a billion dollars into OpenAI so people can make fan movies. It was to, it was for the tech, it was to figure out how to integrate the technology across the board. I mean, my personal opinion on this is I think Disney undersold themselves here. They honestly don't need, OpenAI should pay Disney a billion dollars to use their IP, honestly, because Disney IP is probably some of the most recognizable on the planet.

8:42For sure. I mean, I'm thinking, you know, the studios might be trying to develop or figure out how to make their own AI models that are good. That's pretty hard. And they're kind of behind. They can't really invest in Google. open ai is probably out of the big ones that have good video models one of the options that they can you know kind of sort of like going back a few years with microsoft and open ai and microsoft getting a foothold in in chat gpt that they're able to like out of all the available models have good video models open ai is one where they can latch on to and put some money in a partner up and get a leg a jump start in developing their own models for whatever behind the scenes uses that are probably going to come into play that aren't in this agreement or in this announcement.

9:28Yeah, I think there would have only been a handful of companies big enough to serve a customer as big as Disney, right? Like, you're absolutely right. It's either OpenAI, Google, Meta, and maybe a few other companies. What I thought was going to happen was Disney was going to make multiple partnerships in different avenues of their business. So, for example, Theme Park would have a very specific need for AI, maybe in the realm of physical AI with robots, right? So that's an NVIDIA partnership, perhaps. And then Entertainment, because it's image and video heavy, would have a partnership with perhaps Google so they could use Vio and so on.

10:08So I thought they would segment it out better. But a blanket OpenAI endorsement across the board, across all the business channels, to me that seems it's just too broad across the board yeah and the other the other wild card is and we talk about it on the show all the time is some of the best models on the planet are chinese models alibaba models tencent models kaisho models disney has a great relationship with chinese companies why not exploit some of that and they're an american-based company i don't know the optics but that might not be the best maybe yeah during the current administration perhaps not yeah yeah so i mean i think maybe just if there's an opening and they can invest in one of the biggest u.s ai startups that has a decent video model it's a good opening uh but yeah i'm curious what because it can't just be this can't just be a billion dollars to make fan videos there's got to be other uses or under under the hood opportunities or maybe open ai gave disney a sneak peek at some of the artificial general intelligence stuff that they're working on and Iger was so impressed.

11:15It's like, oh, I can replace a thousand people with a thousand of these AI agents. Let's go. Let's go. So maybe it is some of it. We saw how the Lionsgate Runway-Lionsgate partnership went. I think maybe there's grand visions of everything you can automate, but then reality hits. But there's still a lot of efficiencies that you could improve on or open up new possibilities of just, you know, like, maybe it just makes enables making a bunch more episodic IP a lot faster. One thing I did think was interesting, as far as kind of the intellectual property and likenesses, especially relating to real people, the Sora deal, as far as for the user set, they'll only be able to draw from a set of 200 animated masked and creature characters from disney marvel pixar and star wars so no characters that are tied into a human actor likeness so like not not like hawkeye or somebody like that not like yes iron man but here it says on the bottom two iconic animated or illustrated versions of marvel and lucasfilm characters so not the you know not harrison ford han solo but animated han solo not robert downey jr tony stark iron man but like animated iron man so none of these deals it seems like relate to actual sag actors who have portrayed these characters they're either animated characters from the start you know like frozen and the disney stuff or the animated version of the marvel characters or star wars characters yeah i mean it's it's i could see it on that side of it as well on the actors and their likeness the other side is it doesn't dilute disney's primary output which is theatrical and the stuff that goes to streaming i think yeah that quality bar and that's something they'll segment away from whatever this is going to generate and this is going to be a lower tier stuff yeah and i mean in that realm too so like okay you're a fan you make some fan video with sora with these characters it ends up on disney plus do you think there's like an appetite like people are gonna want to watch uh people are still going to youtube i don't think disney will ever build a ugc oriented platform actually i mean you said you're you i remember when you were talking about like months ago you're like you're a big fan of the uh the stormtrooper vlogs yeah i love those things yeah what if someone made you know the version of that i don't know for like the avengers tower like vlogs of like worker in the avengers and then that ended up on the problem is When it gets to Disney +, it's so moderated and curated.

14:03And by the time something publishes, it loses all of the appeal, all of the sizzle. Versus somebody that genuinely loves Star Wars just makes the thing that they think is the most relevant to the lore, puts it up on YouTube. It's raw. It hits on all the notes that a fan wants. So I think that's the difference. Disney +, is this big, regulated, safe machine. And any user-generated content just goes in there and dies. in my opinion yeah i'm just yeah i'm curious if like i mean we might be the wrong audience for this like i'm curious if kids would pick up on or have i bet they're not going to know or care but if they're like in the disney plus ecosystem they've run out of how many rewatches of frozen they can do but then there's like a whole frozen expanded universe of fan-made frozen films will they watch that will that keep them around i think uh in the short term it'll certainly generate buzz and you know what's important for disney is if they can tie it to an ad tier revenue model then that's an easy sort of almost passive income for them because they're not really making any of that content but they're charging for ads and making money off of that i mean that's all you know it's being a money at ads and stuff that's also another question that wasn't really addressed here but like if you are a fan that makes a film that ends up on disney plus is there is there a rev share are you getting paid are they going to like license that for me are they going to do any type of youtube ad share split with you uh that wasn't really clear so are you just making it for the love of the game and bragging rights that you got a thing that you created on disney plus or will this turn into some like actual industry that's that's a really good point one of the reason why youtube is so successful as it is is because it actually allows creators to make a living and make real money right so disney has to almost build an economy overnight for that and then the other thing i mean it's kind of good research for disney because it's like they can see what characters, what storylines, what kind of things are people gravitating towards that they want to see?

15:57How are they using this? Which could inform future stuff that they actually produce or make because they get better audience data and research. You talked about this before. We talked about this when it came to Showrunner, I think, where you make a thousand shows and then the studio just looks at the top 10 that's performing really well and turn those into its own IP and so on. Yeah, yeah, potentially. But I mean, if they're savvy enough to see that loophole and use it, I think. But yeah, this feels like a really broad stroke, like almost taking an axe to where a scalpel would be better. I don't know if this is the right move for Disney.

16:37And certainly in the image and video generation world, I mean, so many other models are better than what Sora is today or the image generation model is. I know they have other stuff coming out, but OpenAI's main focus is really LLMs and artificial general intelligence. I think the image and video stuff is just a side hustle for them. Yeah, but also we know sort of what it's capable of. I mean, the IP that they're focusing on is animated, illustrated, so that's a little bit easier to do. and we know that they drastically watered down Sora like after the first week and when they got hit with like all of the content owners being like stop so there is you know I'm gonna guess that this is like a more powerful under the hood version that Disney can unlock because they're giving it their blessing so and plus who knows what's in the pipeline or what they haven't released so yeah you know maybe yeah obviously they're not sora from 2024 where it just kind of like blew everyone's mind of what was possible that is like a distant memory compared to everything that we have now between vo and cling and uh c dance and all the other models did you hear about the code red at open ai i did hear about the code red explain to our listeners what that is i mean i just saw the headline so maybe you know more of the details but basically that they felt like google i mean google has definitely caught up to more than eyes and surpassed them in a lot of facets uh yeah i mean basically that they've got to they can't they're trying to handle the truth they got they got their asses whooped man yeah yeah maybe they they were so far ahead of the game and then maybe fell asleep at the wheel a little bit now they gotta speed it up again right is that accurate was there anything specific yeah gemini outperform chat gpt and a lot of um intelligence testing obviously vo 3.1 is a better model than sora 2 google's nanobanana pro is better than whatever chat gpt has nowadays so yeah google's beating open ai on all those fronts on top of that i think open ai is in financial trouble at the moment because although they have like billions of tokens that's called every day right like their api is bonkers in the usage that it has having said that their actual revenue from that is not covering the cost of basically running the company yeah i know there are like kind of these circular deals that are getting announced of someone invest in open ai and open ai invests in partners up with a server farm uh data center partnership deal.

19:19Data center invests in NVIDIA chips, NVIDIA invests in OpenAI, and this whole round and round. I don't know if our audience is interested in the AI bubble and what would happen if OpenAI went away? What would happen if NVIDIA went away? These things are highly unlikely to happen, but if it does, comment and let us know. I would love to do a deep dive episode on that. Yeah, if that's of interest, yeah. I think we've maybe skirted with like how wonky we get. And also it's not, we're not industry experts, but we can, I mean, I'm just more curious, you know, from like, you know, obviously a Hollywood perspective and all the crazy stuff happening in this industry.

19:57What would relate to this industry if there is a bubble burst or crash in the tech and AI industry? Because it's not like if that crashes, this industry is insulated from the repercussions of that. I'll totally do a deep dive on it if you guys want me to. Just hit some comments down there. Let us know. Speaking of OpenAI and new image models, you saw this one, Addy. There is rumored to be a new OpenAI model popping up in LM Arena. This is how we all found out about Natibanana. Before it was publicly released, it showed up in LM Arena and started blowing everyone out of the water. So there's a new model, two new models.

20:40Codenames are Chestnut and Hazelnut. Key observations from this post from Marmaduke91. World knowledge similar to Nano Banana Pro, which makes sense because, I mean, they've got ChatGPT, so it has that world understanding. Can generate celebrity selfies with very similar quality to Nano Banana Pro. Can write code in images very well. I don't know why I do that. okay so i mean yeah so some pictures you know possibly generated on with models that's not celebrities i don't think that's good yeah it has a pasted like the lighting conditions are different for everybody they're all hitting the same weird pose with their teeth except for the the duck face on the right yeah this is not real at all i mean it's sharper and better quality i would say than the whatever the current chat to be team which models called 4-0 but i wouldn't say this still seems behind out of an app.

21:32Yeah, this is like a year back. I mean, I think we would have been happy with just having everybody's face replicated correctly, but now we're looking at how it all melts together, how it integrates into the same environment, and does it invoke an emotion from the prompt and all those other things. I don't think it's there. I mean, also, I forgot, someone pointed this out online too. Like, what happened to having more blockage to being able to generate likeness of celebrities. Like, it kind of seems like most of the models have stopped blocking that. And there wasn't really, like, an explanation or announcement of just, like, we're not going to block, you know, doing celebrity likenesses anymore.

22:11It's pretty much... I think Not About a Pro lets you do it. Pretty much all the models... That used to be a big blockage thing before, and now they kind of all let you run wild with it. Yeah, maybe the celebrities just want their faces out in the public more, so they don't care. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. uh this was a this was a sample demo of text on a board i mean like a sharp text but it looks like uh printed text it doesn't look like the hand-drawn demos that we saw from nanobanana pro when you asked it like hey make a whole like flowchart board of like how the system works this just looks like it's kind of spitting out it's catching up it's catching up to nanobanana one i would say you know nano banana pro is still a little bit ahead and uh z image is up there to me c dance 4 is up there uh so yeah it's nowhere near those like elite image models at the moment so you're saying they got to keep that code red going like still code brown code brown do you know that code code machenta no it's code brown is when you have to go to the bathroom

23:22that's from you're saying that's from a dreamworks movie i think it's the penguins or something which stream all right what wait what penguin movie you never saw the penguins movie they had their own movie no oh my god benedict cumberbatch was in it it was great it was so well done all right i'll have to check it out no 10 years later i'll have to check it out i'll put it on my letterbox queue i think i have the dvd somewhere you can borrow it if you have a dvd player i i was gonna say i don't i don't have a dvd player anymore yeah okay and then last update uh this is a new model announcement from sync uh called react one and it is basically a character performance modifier it looks really promising from the videos that you're showing me, Joey.

24:10Yeah. So we're watching their announcement video. And so the interesting thing, I mean, the UI is interesting because it kind of, it says you can both, it works, obviously it works on generated AI videos, but also you could upload videos. And again, I know we talked about this. I don't even remember what the model name was last week, but we had something similar last week. Was it Kling01? I thought it was another model that was sort of about performance changing. Maybe it was Kling. Yeah. Anyways, putting aside all of the legal and ethical issues of modifying a real life actor's performance without their consent uh just focusing on this tech of like what you can do as an option so you can upload footage and change the performance i mean look at some of these i would say yeah it's breaking a little bit has a little bit of a canniness and that demo we just saw that was both changing the emotion but it was also changing the the language dialogue yes yeah so obviously dubbing and having the lip sync match for the dubbing is a big industry this is what uh flawless does flawless the company i was gonna say flawless this is coming for their lunch i think as far as i know flawless is flawless kind of enterprisey like i don't think is flawless self-serve or like i'm sure it's all custom built per movie or per show yeah yeah so like you can't as a average joe go to flawless and be like, hey, I want to use your software to modify my videos.

25:36Yeah. So this, with sync, you can. It's self-serve. I think it's on file already with the API. So you can call this up and modify generated videos, which obviously there's a good use case for that, where you're generating AI performances or characters or whatever. And maybe 90 % of the video is good, but you don't really like how the AI actor is delivering the line. After the Tilly Nord crap, I don't want to keep calling them AI actors. just don't use the word actor just put ai beings i don't know ai the avatars the generated performance yeah avatar you know having more control over the perceived delivery is good i think the leonardo dicapre example is especially hard because it's such a fast moving performance and so exaggerated already so maybe they just didn't get his mouth is just like dude he is one of the best performers ever to live you're not gonna replace his performance his mouth in this shot looks like the mouth blowing up in in fight club yeah but i i do think it's a look it's a it's a promising somebody would have to do this sooner or later because there's such a big market in dubbing transcoding you know into different languages um netflix alone i think serves movies in like i don't know 70 different languages something like that it depends on the show on the movie but yeah i mean if you if you ever watched the actual if you let the credits of a netflix original or whatever play and you don't go to the watch next the credits go on forever and then the credits change to like production for the france translation the spanish translation and there's just like an endless scroll of credits of like every team responsible for the uh the local dubbing uh in that language now us americans we're on the receiving end right like now there are movies that are just made in korean that are really natively korean that we have to consume right so it's coming back this way as well yeah and you know having subtitles is on as hit or miss with some people with general audience don't like that over having the audio change but then if you have the voice uh dubbed voice you get the weird lip sync issue so yeah biggest addressable market is dubbing and changing the mouths to move uh to match the local or the dubbed language secondary i think is like modifying a performance of someone yeah i gotta say using cling01 for some facial performance stuff and i sent you some text about it joey it just doesn't know what to do with the face like in general and that i think that's cling01's biggest weakness without if you don't have facial heavy performance but you give it like body language performance or non-human things to do it does it extremely well but it just struggles with the face is such a complex thing for an ai model to comprehend and then modify yeah and we're obviously as humans tuned to faces and i can very picky about when things shift in uncanny values i will say the other thing i like uh not having played with the software yet but in this demo this sort of pop-up ui interface where it sort of does map the face and it's not just a text prompt to kind of change what you want but also this sort of heads-up display with different options for emotions, kind of different, an actual 3D mapped face.

28:58So I like what they're demoing here with the ability to control and sort of giving more tactile controls and not just a text prompt to be like, make them more happy in order to change the performance. So I like what they're doing with that. All about simple user interfaces. This is great. So yeah, I'm curious to see what applications people find with this. Well, yeah, you heard it here first, folks. Sync. Sync. React 1 model. all right good place to wrap it up all right just a quick couple of shout outs to our viewers on youtube for some really positive encouragement we could use it so thank you to william reed 74 and iv web 44 we thank you thank you uh links for everything we talked about at denoise podcast.com thanks for watching and we'll catch you in the next episode