How an AI Would Have Written 10 of the Super Bowl's Biggest Ads

Maisie Williams sings the Frozen soundtrack in a traffic jam? A mascot funeral in which Kool-Aid Man's tears reincarnate Mr. Peanut into a salty Baby Yoda? Some Super Bowl ads were such odd mishmashes of pop culture, they might have sounded like they were compiled by an AI. In that spirit, we decided to see how Adweek's Super Bowl Bot might have approached 10 of the year's most talked-about ads when given a general description of each. From a ghostly Groundhog Day adventure to a cosmic voyage for Snickers, the AI-generated output is, at the very least, bizarre enough to make the real spots seem straightforward by comparison. Adweek has trained the AI on nearly 4,500 descriptions of Super Bowl ads in a dataset consisting of 235,000 words. That's on top of the millions of websites used to train the underlying system, a sophisticated language generation model called GPT-2. But how would it compare to human creatives in a head-to-head Super Bowl showdown? Here are the pitches our Super Bowl Bot came up with as alternatives to 10 of the year's most notable Big Game spots: 1. Jeep How it ran: [kickout id="11"] How the AI would have written it: [kickout id="1"] Here's another possibility suggested by the AI: [In a Jeep ad set in the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray] parks outside the house and lets loose a horrible breath in warning of a hungry, furry gremlin being in his Jeep. 2. Amazon How it ran: [kickout id="12"] How the AI would have written it: [kickout id="2"] The bot often produces a range of ideas on one prompt, and it definitely seemed inspired by Amazon's concept. Here are some of its other suggestions: [In Amazon’s Super Bowl ad about what history was like before Alexa,] the narrator talks about how much people don’t know about climate change. After a medieval king gets his Echo, he tells a story about how his subjects believe in man-made global warming, despite the scientific consensus that says otherwise. The king chimes in with “Are you listening to me?” [In Amazon’s Super Bowl ad about what history was like before Alexa,] the narrator is quick to point out that people didn’t have smart refrigerators—people were using old, dirty, smelly refrigerators. People didn’t have smart phone charging—people had complicated mobile plans with no Wi-Fi. People didn’t have smart bathrooms—people were using the old bathroom fixtures. People didn’t have smart shopping—people were using the old shopping 3. Planters How it ran: [kickout id="13"] How the AI would have written it: [kickout id="3"] 4. Hyundai How it ran: [kickout id="14"] How the AI would have written it: [kickout id="4"] 5. Audi How it ran: [kickout id="15"] How the AI would have written it: [kickout id="5"] 6. Doritos How it ran: [kickout id="16"] How the AI would have written it: [kickout id="6"] 7. Porsche How it ran: [kickout id="17"] How the AI would have written it: [kickout id="7"] 8. Budweiser How it ran: [kickout id="18"] How the AI would have written it: [kickout id="8"] 9. Cheetos How it ran: [kickout id="19"] How the AI would have written it: [kickout id="9"] 10. Snickers How it ran: [kickout id="20"] How the AI would have written it: [kickout id="10"] Clearly, the AI has its own ideas as to how these commercials should have played out. If it had its way, "Mr. Awesome" would've been the new Baby Nut, Lil Nas X and Sam Elliott would've competed in a "game of death" rather than a dance-off, and Snickers would've depicted some kind of strange cosmic spectacle. But there was some unprompted overlap between the real and bot-imagine spots: Maisie Williams is also cast in a musical spot, and John Krasinski appears in Hyundai's ad without us having had to prompt the bot to include him—though both could be chalked up to this year's Super Bowl commercials already being included in the bot's training data. In any case, the AI needs some work before it's quite ready for a full-time gig as a creative director. But given that some of these ideas sound pretty compelling, we humans probably shouldn't get too comfortable.