OP is the original upload, but the agency reposted it with English subs after it got popular outside of France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLERt5ZkpQ4
replies(3):
It's hard to measure on Youtube due to the weight of paid views but still.
Anyway, it's a cute ad.
This one copy on X has 27 million views after 2 days: https://x.com/pawcord/status/1998361498713038874
The ad is doing it on purpose. It is literally manipulating you and you are spreading the malicious influence to other people. It's not AI but it sure is 'slop'. Propaganda, even.
...slopagada
Wasn't it even Tron who didn't qualify for the special effects oscar because they "used computers"?
It's interesting that it's no longer "computer bad", now it's "AI bad".
The company is virtue signaling, pandering, and you're falling for it. Jesus Christ.
I think people will make reasonable decisions about whether or not to purchase food this winter with or without the "malicious influence" of these ads.
Enjoy your simulated steak.
Soon, we’ll have no idea what’s AI-generated or not. I care about good, tight story telling.
In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?
fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists, I am a business/technology person who happens to be decent at story telling and naturally not awful at picture making - I would have gotten crushed by what the technologies enabled as the abstractions and programatic features opened up film making to people who didn't want to or couldn't naturally grasp the physics/controls. I'm grateful past me was able to think about this clearly because it lead me to meeting Ben and Moisey and joining them to go on and build DigitalOcean, one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
It is true!
And as a (very occasional) customer, I like that this company is signalling that it does not oppose inclusion and doesn't mind questioning "traditional values" (the wolf eating animals).
Many actors these days (both companies and political figures) are very much signalling the contrary, so some kind of signalling is absolutely useful.
Personally I interpreted the fish as either a timely Christian symbol (and fish at Christmas is traditional in some places) or simply because a meat dish would not have worked in context.
If all you care about is just the story then maybe you personally will be satisfied but a lot of people cared about the animations, cinematography, etc, and all of the work that went into that.
I guess the McDonald's ad didn't need words either, but it was just depressing and awful.
Likewise with the Coca Cola ad, the agency said in their defense that they had to sift through 70,000 video generations to assemble the few dozen shots in the final ad. And after all that sifting they still couldn't get the one element of continuity (the Coke truck) to look consistent from shot to shot, and had to manually composite over all of the Coke logos since the model kept mangling them.
Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved.
[EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality.
Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap.
Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
If you can produce great things easily, then it is lazy. But if worked hours and hours including through Christmans, then it is great even if result is crap.
Nobody knows what involved AI and what didn’t. At the end of the day, if you care about your work, it shows.
1) To date, there has been no example of AI that is good. It's not even close.
And 2) Why should I be interested in a story nobody was interested in telling? If you don't want to make a video, or tell a story, or write a song, then...just don't. Why even have an AI do it?
I may be wrong, but I get the sense that computer art was welcomed by people actually working in the field (did professionals criticize the computer graphics in Star Wars or Wrath of Khan?) and it was mostly the lay public that saw it as somehow not real. The opposite seems to be true for AI "art."
People at the time also said using a computer was fundamentally different from putting in a ton of work into building physical models.
A lot of tech adoption is motivated by economics, so the argument that "before it was more work, now it's less work" will almost always apply regardless of the specifics. I don't think it's a useful thing to focus on. It's almost a moral argument: I deserve it because I suffered for it, but he did it easy so he doesn't deserve it.
In fact, I would even go further. I would say it's part of the definition of technology. What is technology? Technology is a thing or an idea, created or discovered, that makes work easier and/or cheaper.
https://youtu.be/AhTM4SA1cCY?si=DVczeTNpaomkB1y0
(That's the extended version for some extra calm).
I do not like the beer, but they nailed what I want for Christmas
Unless your goal is purely to capture people who don't and won't read, as cheaply and cynically as possible.
But for creative work? I think it matters a lot. You used the phrase "creating art." I don't think it counts as "creating" if there's no work going into it. Typing some words into a prompt box and getting a video out is not "creating," any more than doing an image search and printing out an image of a painting is creating a painting.
Printers are extremely useful devices, but they don't create art.
Interesting, especially as the city is also host to some of the best gaming developers.
Absolutely. Have you been living under a rock? /jk ;-)
No there won't. Same how there was no consumer pushback when everything from your Nikes to Apple computers moved to be made in China by slave labor and gutted your manufacturing industry at the same time while consumers and shareholders cheered.
Consumers only care about value for money not where or how a product is made. People's morals go out the window when their hard earned paycheque is on the line. Capitalist competition is dehumanizing by nature. The only thing that can help maintain humanity is government regulation because expecting consumers to prioritize morality over price has always failed.
If AI companies give consumers the same product but cheaper, they'll win.
And do what about it? People don't give a shit AI is replacing creators jobs same how people didn't give a shit automation or offshoring replaced blue collar jobs. Literally nobody cared when the actors and writers went on strike so nobody will care when they'll be replaced by AI.
Especially when the quality of human made entertainment has been on a steep decline over the last 10 years consumers will even cheer to see them replaced same how they cheered when they could buy higher quality Japanese made cars at lower prices.
I think this might be your nostalgia. The thing looks different in different scenes, and there's a scene that feels like it's a guy inside from the way it moves. So I disagree that Alien is peak special effects. (still peak over things. Peak ambience for sure)
People really don't care that much, especially when for something positive, original and funny somebody grumpy comes along and tries to drag discussion down their misery pit.
edit: getting downvoted to hell, but I think my question is valid. What does it mean "no AI"? Are we just limiting ourselves to the render?
But only bad CGI is visible. I guarantee you have watched CGI footage and not noticed. At all.
The problem over the last decade or so hasn't been the technical limits of CGI, but studio unwillingness to spend enough on it to make it good.
And directors have also become less creative. You can find UK newsreels from the 50s on YouTube, and some of the direction and editing are superb - a beautiful mix of abstraction, framing, and narrative.
Most modern directors don't have that kind of visual literacy. The emphasis is more on spectacle and trying to bludgeon audiences into submission, not on tastefulness and visual craft.
If the actual result of AI is an unlimited supply of adequate media personalized to our tastes, I don't foresee there being any objection. Right now, it's honestly just shovelware on a scale that hasn't been seen before. No one likes shovelware except maybe toddlers.
As far as I know, any film can be submitted for Academy Award consideration in any category, then an executive committee determines the eligibility of each submission and chooses up to 20 films to move onto the nomination process.
I don't think this committee publishes anything about its decision-making process, so presumably Lisberger is just guessing based on his impression of industry sentiment at the time.
Current-era CGI is insanely good. The problem is that it's used and abused everywhere, often with very little consideration for whether it's needed, or if there's time to do all the VFX shots etc.
has the director saying it though.
Lisberger recounts. "We did all those effects in about seven months, which included inventing the techniques." "Tron," however, wasn't nominated for a special-effects Oscar. "The Academy thought we cheated by using computers," he scoffs.
And given how people are praising this one (that looks exactly like the ones I was used to growing up) I can only guess that the situation must be awful.
In my child's school, there are only three dietary choices for the kids who eat at the canteen:
* No pork / sans porc (for the muslim or jewish children)
* No meat / sans viande (but there's still fish!)
* Everything
Fury Road is pure wall to wall CGI. People keep pointing to it as some example of doing things with live action when the entire movie is soaked with CG and compositing.
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/a-graphic-tale-the-visual...
But the fish / meat / etc is a tradition thing, so it comes from the culture surrounding the Christian, and probably more relating to Jewish history more than anything
The movies and TV that can be made now without the limitations of the past are significantly different, from period movies to super hero movies and everything in between. Watch the 1970s superman or logan's run and see how they hold up.
The vast majority of CG you don't notice.
people do more practical effects, they also miss the era of physical set filming[0], i personally am bored seeing the latest gpu able to create gazillions of whatever because i got the memo, gpu can do everything.. i get more magic seeing what people did with very few
don't get fooled by the "people reject evolution every time"
[0] technology can distort the focus onto the tool out of the art, films before had to arbitrate between various tricks to get a scene to work, now apparently people don't. they film bits and postprocess everything later, the tech allows infinite changes, but the cake has no taste
During lent, you weren't supposed to eat meat as part of your fast. However, not eating meat is... not as enjoyable as eating meat, so they basically declared that fish doesn't count as meat so they could eat it without breaking the fast.
For similar reasons, they also declared beavers to be fish later on.
"worldwide hit"
Please make white peoples'* astroturfing great again.
* I include Ashkenazi Jews in this category, in case anyone cares.
I guess that will speak to if you will find the ad funny or just depressing. I don't think the Ai helped either way.
I'm not sure if that bet really paid off. I feel like the number or both "skilled artist" and "skilled storyteller" didn't really move. It just feels higher because the barrier to entry and validation is "how well can I market myself on social media?" Not "can I get into/create my own studio?" or any other metric a craftsman would use. I don't necessarily callel this a bad thing, and I'd even argue that it only magnified existing issues instead of creating new new ones. but it has obvious down sides.
Deviant art played a part in that, so kudos. Or perhaps, you've doomed us all? Hard to say, I always had a strange relationship with DeviantArt.
Agreed, wake me when that happens.
If we ever get to that point...im still ambivalent. I also get exposed to media to form community. And Ai very explicly wants to tear down communities and create a factory of slop. Even if we can get some good Ai storytelling, I'm not sure if a tree fighting the flood is enough. It's going to topple eventually as the roots get washed out
>In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?
I thought it was cute. I can nitpick, but it gave a feeling of family and community, and how you can't form that by devouring your peers.
The McDonald's ad meanwhile : "the world's going to shit, use McDonald's as your apocalypse bunker! (no loitering tho)". Heck, it feels like the kind of ad Fallout or Outer Worlds would make on an in-game TV.
It's because you haven't noticed. It's an observability bias.
(Also I think the ad is really nice)
Alien nails it like 80% of the time (I've watched it twice in the last year, in 4k on a wall-size screen, so it's fresh for me). It's an early, major example of getting it damn near perfect pretty often. Not every shot's great—like, about two-thirds of the shots of the exterior of the landing craft look like a miniature, not as glaring as a Showa-era Godzilla or anything, but you can tell—but it's still a better average than modern computer-heavy movies. It's one of the earliest that's exhibiting the potential of peak pre-CG special effects, if not nailing it all the time. But, very few movies nail it all the time, including modern ones doing the computer graphics thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/11/mcdonalds-r...
It seems like an excellent advert because it got everybody talking about McDonalds. Even this thread talks more about McDonalds than the “French supermarket’s” ad. The “French supermarket” isn’t even named in the title. The people who came up with the McDonalds ad were wildly successful in what they set out to do; they even have all the people who hate AI talking about their new ad, even when attempting to showcase somebody else’s ad.
No consumer complained 15 years ago when the VFX industry in LA was outsourced to Vancouver and London due to subsidizes [0], and no consumer complained when VFX in Vancouver or London was outsourced to India and China over the last 5 years. No one will complain when VFX studios leverage AI to create content and then maybe have around 20-30% of the remaining humans edit videos to be humanlike.
Ironically, the Trump admin proposed a tariff that would help bring VFX back to the US [1] but the same consumers who on here are complaining about AI and Offshoring are the same ones who opposed such a tariff. Of course, if the Biden or a hypothetical Harris admin did something similar, they would also be flamed severely.
And thus the cycle continues. You all will keep complaining, but will keep purchasing from Costco, Trader Joe's, Patagonia, etc, will keep consuming content from one of the handful of companies that have consolidated media, and will remain employed by tech companies that in some shape or form continue to help maintain this cycle.
Statistically speaking, the demographic on HN told blue collar workers in 2009-17 to "learn to code". Why should they have sympathy for you? And thus the cycle continues.
[0] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-feb-01-la-fi-ct...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-impose-100...
There's a good chunk of modern blockbusters that will CGI everything in a scene except the lead actor's face - and sometimes that too.
The person I replied to said it was "mostly real". Lots of CG is done in realistic ways but people pick and choose what they decide is good based on the movies they already like. Fury Road has somehow become an example of "doing things for real" when the whole movie is non stop CG shots.
A lot of the examples from the article (which is a very good article, thank you for linking it) were mostly about paint-outs, color grading, or background elements.
No they weren't, there are CG landscapes, CG mountains, CG canyons, CG crowds, CG storms, CG cars, CG arm replacements and many entirely CG shots. It's the whole movie.
As if people are not "cooking" the exact same food bought from these supermarkets.
Computers are bad, unless used by exactly the necessary measure to add to the story. Then they are great. But most movies don't do that, and you can see the actors not reacting to the scenes they are in because they have no idea what's actually happening.
The same will probably happen to AI, with also most people overdoing it and making bad stuff. Forever.
Like Top Gun: Maverick, Ford vs. Ferrari, Napoleon, The Martian, 1917, Barbie, Alien: Romulus... to name just a few: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46238167
(Which is a shame, as IA video generation can do much better if the author cares a bit about what they're doing).
Fish don't appear to have the ability to speak or engage in social relationship with other animals in the story, so it makes sense to eat them. Like vegan find it OK eating mushrooms even though they are closer to us than they are to plants.
[edit] my point, anyway, isn’t that any given effect is better. It’s not even necessarily that the movies are better (The Passion of Joan of Arc barely had effects at all, and didn’t have synced sound, for god’s sake, an it’s incredible—of course CG-having movies can be great) but that I tend to find the overall effect of those movies better. Those “seamless” mundane CG effects shots of things like composited computer-generated rooms or streets rarely get the kind of attention a real set does, and the movies suffer for it. Nobody had to move around the space with their real body and think about it, and it usually (usually! Not every single time) shows, if not in anything wrong, exactly, then in the degree to which it’s perfectly forgettable and fails to contribute anything but filling screen space.
[edit edit] more to the point, peak practical wins at convincing effects in the Big Damn Action Moment. But only peak, and that was a tragically brief span. Point me to a CG sci-fantasy space fight that looks better and/or more like a real thing that’s happening than the battle above Endor in return of the Jedi (you’ll notice I didn’t pick the earlier two movies, as Jedi is where they really perfected it all—though even the first has some shots that are quite convincing!). Like truly if you know of one I’d love to see it. I never have. They all look plainly computer generated. I’m not saying every frame of those SFX shots in Jedi is perfect, but it looks overall more real than anything similar I’ve seen done in a computer. Like you’d think in about 40 years it’d have been surpassed multiple times, but no. They all look CG.
Or, like… put the best 50% of practical shots in Jurassic Park against the best 50% of CG-heavy dino action shots in any Jurassic Park from 3 on. They’re more convincing than any of the CG shots. (Some, from the field of all practical effects shots in the film, are not convincing! But a hell of a lot are, and not just better than the median CG effect in later JPs or something, but better than all). We struggle to touch the tippy-top peak of that craft with computer effects, still today.
Of course that's not the point of the ad and I don't blame them for not making it a philosophical discussion, but it's the same approach that Madagascar uses (spoiler for a 20yo movie) to resolve their main conflict and both feel like cheating - if the penguins can think, I always thought, then so should the fishes.
I mean for fuck’s sake, they’d probably CG the paint buckets in Home Alone if they made it today. And we’d get some tasteless can-cam shot, because you don’t have to figure it out, you can just do it. And they’d look fake because they’d move too perfectly, lacking the kinds of little off-seeming movements that a real paint can in a real take might do. Never might the can obscure a few frames of face when the directors might choose otherwise, and the result will be obviously CG through its convenience if not due to outright flaws.
Excessive perfection and too many things moving the optimal way for the shot or exactly the way the viewer expects are under-appreciated tells of CG, and they’re deadly ones, present even in a lot of “perfect” CG (give it a few years, we thought the CG in Lord of the Rings was convincing and now it looks like trash). They need to start CGing their fake environments sometimes doing something slightly less than ideal to an actor’s jacket, or something, and not to call attention to it as a comedy relief moment, but because “that’s just what happened” (not really, but it’d make the effects more convincing)
I disagree. An ad is always an ad. But it can also be art. This ad has artistic merit, and I think people are reacting to that.
It means no AI. If I say you used no AI but had an LLM write or refine the script, I would have lied.
You may be getting downvoted because your comment's tone can read as accusatively presumptive. "Who knows" isn't a useful contribution to almost any discussion. Which is a shame, because you raise an interesting point–I would personally feel fine saying no AI was used to do work even if I used AI to help me with research. (Provided I read all the primary sources.)
The name of the supermarket is mentioned in the title when the audience is likely to know it, e.g. on French websites. I don’t blame any American who does not know Intermarché, as they are very unlikely to come across one. I am not going to link them because that’s a bit pointless and the URLs are terrible, but a quick googling of "publicité Intermarché" should give plenty of examples.
If the table was filled with carrots as guests, do you think the rabbits would be invited? The original wolf would.
I know, I know, it is about bettering yourself.
It's also over-reliance on this convenience. Bad shot? We'll fix it in post. Objects missing, or in wrong places, or too many of them? We'll fix it in post. Bad sound, camera position, actor unavailable? Believe it or not, post.
And many don't even think whether you should prepare the shot for post-production, or even give vfx teams more time to complete the work
There seems to be this pressure to either go fully vegetarian or it doesn't count, which is obviously total nonsense.
I think the argument is “meat is murder because you can survive without it”. Maybe that doesn’t work for the wolf, but I mean, it’s literally a story being made up for a child, and animals in those are allegories for humans.
I can choose to not eat meat and live healthily, but I’m not going to feed only vegetables to a pet cat, who needs something different. To each what they need, as ethically as possible. When you can minimise harm, do.
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungus. Complaining about eating those is akin to complaining about eating apples; you’re not harming the tree.
On the other hand, the McDonald's ad is obviously AI-rendered, but all the concepts and prompts and choices might have been made by humans? Which doesn't make it any better (although it's not that bad, it's just average).
I think Brits tend to be more cynical than Americans, though, so it kinda tracks.