This week, social media has been savaging the new AI-created McDonald’s commercial, calling it soulless, tone-deaf, dystopian, and a bunch of adjectives not fit for reproduction.
But honestly, these people are lying to themselves. They’re mislabeling fear as taste.
The ad is good. It’s not perfect, but it’s clearly a step-function better than most AI-generated efforts we’ve seen. I’d wager it cost a fraction of what a “real” production version of it would cost and will serve as a signpost as the history of this era is written.
The smart critiques focus on how the ad was built: the emotional core is wrong – people like Christmas. Short vignettes dodge consistency issues and fast cuts to hide seams. Sure, but so what?
This commercial is built to minimize the weaknesses of the tools as they exist at the end of 2025, and it works.
Now imagine where these tools will be next year. This year, we’ll argue about whether AI belongs in the Super Bowl. Next year, the debate will be about which spots were AI-assisted. A year after that, no one will ask.
This is the worst it will ever be. That should terrify you if you’re a “creative.” I’ve lost plenty of sleep over it.
This is why people are lashing out. What scares people isn’t that the ad is bad. It’s that it’s good enough, cheap enough, and improving fast enough to collapse the distance between “inspired” and “acceptable,” a gap that used to pay a lot of mortgages.
This McDonald’s ad is bad in the way so much UGC is bad relative to “professional” productions. Has that stopped TikTok or YouTube? McDonald’s pulled the ad under heavy criticism, but this is only a stay of execution.
It’s okay to cope and seethe, but we also need to see clearly. Carefully planned careers are going to be upended over the next few years. We have a right to complain about it, but that won’t change anything. If humans are truly creative in a way that these machines supposedly are not, it’s time to prove it.
