Now let’s talk about Coca-Cola’s new AI-generated holiday ad - the one that supposedly “ruined Christmas” according to social media. Coke partnered with AI studios Silverside and Secret Level to remake its famous holiday truck commercial using artificial intelligence. They even bragged about how the process cut production time from a year to a month. People immediately lost it. Tweets (sorry, posts) were flying: “This is soulless!” “AI is destroying creativity!” “Fire the robots!” It was the same predictable moral panic we’ve been seeing all year. But here’s my hot take - hating on AI doesn’t make you smart or ethical. It just means you’ve joined the latest outrage bandwagon without stopping to think about what you’re actually mad at.
Because let’s be honest - we’ve been here before. When synthesizers showed up in the 80s, musicians called them the death of music. When digital cameras appeared, photographers swore they’d never replace film. When CGI became mainstream, we all groaned about how “everything looks fake now.” And yet, every one of those technologies evolved into something incredible once people learned how to use them well. AI is no different. Yes, the internet is currently flooded with AI-generated garbage made by people who think typing “make it cool” into a prompt counts as art, but that doesn’t mean everything made with AI is garbage. Tools don’t kill creativity - lazy people do.
Can we tell the ad was made with AI? Of course - but that’s like saying you can tell the first Superman movie used green screen. Sure, it’s not perfect, but that doesn’t make the whole process any less real or legitimate.
Look, Coca-Cola’s AI ad isn’t revolutionary. It’s fine. It’s festive. And if they made it with 3d animation software you would all be going “Awwww”. It’s a tech flex. But it’s also a brand experimenting with a new creative tool, not replacing human imagination with Skynet. Calling it “soulless slop” just because a computer helped render it is as lazy as screaming “CGI bad!” every time you see a Marvel movie. Not all CGI is bad, and not all AI is soulless. What matters is the intent and the craft behind it. And in this case, Coke put real effort into trying something new - 100 people worked on that project, just in a different kind of creative role.
AI isn’t the enemy here. The real problem is our knee-jerk hatred of change. We’ve become so conditioned to outrage that we don’t even stop to ask whether something is actually bad - we just see the letters “AI” and start foaming at the mouth. The robots aren’t taking over. They’re just learning to draw, write, and animate a little faster than we expected. So you can either learn to march with it, or you can stand on the sidelines yelling “clanker” at every modern thing you see.
If Coca-Cola wants AI-generated pineapple on their pizza, let them have it. Don’t pretend you’re furious about it just to feel like you belong.
