Recently, while idling (wasting) away time on social media, I came across what appears to be a Budweiser ad. At some time in the past the enormous corporation that makes Budweiser and a number of other beers had, for promotional and advertising purposes, a team of Clydesdale draught horses, or cart horses, that they used to pull an old time beer wagon. This team has been the basis of a series of advertisements for the Super Bowl football game, which have, over the years, become a bit of a Super Bowl advertising tradition. Generally speaking it is not necessarily the team that is central to the advertisement, but possibly a single horse. Usually the draught horse is in some kind of a relationship, generally with another animal. The ads are miniature dramas, that may tend to take place over time, sometimes a period of years. A common theme is friendship between the horse, and the other animal, usually with some kind of sentimental plot twist.
The video that I saw on social media followed this pattern. A horse encounters a baby chick. At some point the horse notes the chick cold and wet in a rainstorm, and comes, standing over the chick, to shelter it from the rain. Eventually the chick, now somewhat larger, is riding on the back of the horse as the horse runs, and, obviously, is trying to fly even with pre-fledged wings. At some point the chick attempts to fly, and falls off and into the mud. Eventually, however, we see the horse galloping at full speed across a field, and, as the chick, now grown to adulthood, unfurls its wings and is, for the first time, successfully flying, it is finally revealed that the chick is, indeed, an American Eagle. (Or, as the rest of the world calls it, a bald eagle.)
In the current heavily politicized and divisive social context of the United states, the choice of a less than detailed but extremely patriotic symbol is undoubtedly one that would appeal to advertising agencies. It is beautiful, sentimental, patriotic, and, if you don't think about it too much, inspiring.
The thing is, while there is nothing in the production or imagery of this advertisement that would suggest it, it is rather glaringly obvious that this commercial advertisement is, almost entirely, the product of generative artificial intelligence.
As I say, there is nothing in the video, faulty imagery or the production, that would give away the artificial intelligent origin of the video. Generative artificially intelligent video generation is now available at high quality, and is, in fact, so commonly available, and so relatively inexpensive, that I didn't initially even know whether this was an actual Budweiser ad. It have been could be a parody by somebody else using the same Budweiser ad pattern. (I have subsequently had some confirmation that this is, in fact, the official Budweiser Super Bowl ad for this year.)
However, it is undoubtedly true that Budweiser has been using generative artificial intelligence for their advertising in recent years. Shooting advertising with animals is fraught with perils. Animals do not necessarily take direction for movie dramas well. Therefore, in order to piece together the storyline that you want, you may have to shoot an awful lot of video, and piece together the story out of what you have.
But there are a number of other indications that this particular piece of video is computer generated.
For one thing, the horse, in this particular piece of video, no longer looks particularly draught-horse-like. Yes, draught horses do look like regular horses, just a little bit bigger. But there are differences. (They are subtle, and it's possible real draught horses were used.)
But it's more about the eagle. I am not an expert on raptors, but I have had the opportunity to observe, and even care for, bald eagles in their pre-fledged state. As they get to the point where they are about to start to grow their fledging feathers, they are enormous creatures, much larger than the supposed chick in this video. I would expect that this part of the video would be computer generated anyways, since it might be difficult to find raptor chicks at the proper stage of growth, and it might be difficult to get a draught horse to be willing to have such a chick placed on its back anyway.
But it is the final scene which is the absolute giveaway. Yes, bald eagles are fairly large birds, and they do have, when seen close up, a surprisingly large wingspan. But the final scene in this video, has a very disproportionately large bald eagle appearing, particularly when we consider it in relation to the size of a proper draught horse.
(There is also the fact that bald eagles do not nest on the ground, and don't develop the white feathers on their head for at least seven years after they are fully-fledged, but nobody in Madison Avenue would know or care about that, anyway.)
As I say, initially I had no way of knowing whether this was an actual Budweiser ad, or someone else's parody. Nothing in the video production gives the game away in regard to computer generation of the imagery. It's really only if you know the relative sizes, and proportions, of draught horses versus regular horses and the relative proportions of both juvenile, and adult, bald eagles, that the errors in this video become apparent.
Why is this in any way significant? Only in that it is yet another example that generative artificial intelligence is now capable of producing content which, visually, is indistinguishable from real life, but is not actually real, and could never be.
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