The AI-or-Not Debate Is Advertising’s Most Pointless Argument

The most expensive finger in marketing belongs to a cartoon character in “Night in Color,” Dior’s new animated holiday short. 

Last week, viewers noticed that character had one joint too many, along with some warped lettering and a lazy eye. Sure enough, the internet outrage machine started getting frothy again. 

Online commenters concluded the film was made with generative AI, usually something that CMOs boast about. But it matters here because Jonathan Anderson, Dior’s creative director, had made a big thing about it not being AI, telling Women’s Wear Daily it was “all hand-drawn.”

The film itself is terrific, which is half the trouble. Sylvain Chomet directed a talking-animal fairy tale about Christian Dior and Marlene Dietrich, and Dior released a making-of to show off the craft. Then Ben Wild, who runs a film studio with Netflix and Disney on its client list, said two people who claim to have worked on it told him the motion was largely AI generated, and the furniture and the bees entirely so. 

Dior has confirmed none of that. It hasn’t denied it either, and as of Friday three outlets had asked and heard nothing. Director Chomet has denied the use of generative AI but acknowledged on Friday its use to smooth out the animation. But the allegation is possibly the least interesting part of the story, because the argument we are now all having is a fairly ridiculous one.

Almost nothing you watch or read is AI free any more. 

From Aerie to Equinox, Brands Are Leaning Into AI Fears

Your phone blends several frames before you have finished pressing the button. Photoshop will cheerfully invent the other half of a sky. AutoTune has been quietly rescuing pop vocals for more than 25 years. Your video captions are automatic and the dialogue in the edit suite was cleaned by machine learning. Every sentence of the column you are reading has been read by Claude to check for grammar and factual errors. 

The monochrome disparity of real and artificial ended around 2024, a gradient that runs from a bit of noise reduction at one end to a creature imagined and drawn entirely by machine at the other, and anyone who tells you there is a clean line between these points is either selling something or full of shit. 

The only sensible questions are where on the gradient you sit and whether you are willing to say so. 

Does it matter if a bee was generated? Probably not. Does it matter if you said it wasn’t? Very much. 

And if your brand DNA is forged from human creativity and hand-made, even more so.

There is a reason Dior wanted to claim it was hand-drawn. In a feed drowning in machine video, visible/fallible human effort has become a luxury cue. Prada, Porsche, Levi’s and Apple all went manual for the same reason. And Dior wants to be at the same luxurious, hand-drawn party. But a cue only works if it is expensive, and expensive takes time. Wild’s version is that Dior rushed into the film after hearing Prada had an animation legend on board, but you can’t speed up things like this. At least not without AI.

If Dior had said early on that a team of artists drew the keyframes and a machine helped with the gaps, I would not be writing this column. A few purists would have grumbled and everyone would have admired the bees and appreciated that Dior was a modern brand. Instead, it made a claim of pure manual labor, and that became the point of the ad—and its endemic flaw.

Luxury, more than any other category, cannot afford to be caught out. A mass brand can get away with it because nobody expects a Doritos ad to be drawn by monks. But luxury sells provenance first and product second, so provenance is the product, and a story about hands that turns out to be about graphics cards doesn’t just damage an ad’s reception, it invites people to revisit how they think about the brand.

Which is a shame. Because this was a refreshing idea from Anderson. And a lovely bit of advertising. But the bigger lesson is that this debate about AI or not AI is possibly the most pointless in all of advertising right now. And brands do well to avoid it completely. The work is the work. Boasting that it is “AI generated” or claiming that it is “entirely hand-made” are both pointless and increasingly impossible positions to adopt.

The 2026 Holiday Ads Worth Watching