McDonald’s Netherlands took down its recent Christmas ad after receiving widespread criticism and mockery for its use of generative artificial intelligence.
“It’s hard to recall a more soulless and ingenuine piece of work than this,” one user on X wrote.
The 45-second ad opens with the sung line, “it’s the most terrible time of the year,” a parody of Andy Williams’s “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” Christmas jingle, before delving into a rapid montage of AI-generated clips of people struggling amid holiday chaos.
The ad concludes with an AI-generated man walking into a McDonald’s as “so you flee from the madness, the lights and the cheer, and hide out in McDonald’s till January’s here,” is sung in the background.
“Not even considering the ai slop, the messaging of the ad is literally ‘fuck christmas, fuck your family, eat mcdonald’s instead,’ one X user criticized.
The Sweetshop, which produced the ad with Dutch company TBWA\Neboko, defended its work in a statement quoted by tech news outlet Futurism, saying “for seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club [our in-house AI engine] working in lockstep with the directors.”
“We generated what felt like dailies — thousands of takes — then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production,” Melanie Bridge, the company’s CEO, reportedly said. “This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film.”
Bridge went on to say she doesn’t “see this spot as a novelty or a cute seasonal experiment,” but instead “evidence of something much bigger.”
“That when craft and technology meet with intention, they can create work that feels genuinely cinematic. So no — AI didn’t make this film. We did,” Bridge reportedly said in the statement.
Users online were quick to mock the company’s response.
“It genuinely pains me when reading about AI and people use the phrase ‘writing AI prompts’ like it’s something to be proud of artistically,” one X user’s post with over 2,000 likes read. “Cannot believe our advancement of society is the plague of AI.”
“Companies are racing to see who can piss off the most amount of people with the lowest amount of effort,” another X user wrote.
A spokesperson for McDonald’s Netherlands told HuffPost that the ad, which has now been taken down from YouTube, “was intended to reflect the stressful moments that can occur during the holidays in the Netherlands.”
“But we recognize that for many of our guests, the season is ‘the most wonderful time of the year,’ the spokesperson said. “We respect that and remain committed to creating experiences that offer good times and good food for everyone.”