This AI-generated Toronto Blue Jays commercial is pure nightmare fuel
The rapid rise of AI-generated content has terrifying implications for the future of many professions, but for now, the evolving technology is striking a different kind of fear into the hearts of the masses.
A new AI-generated Toronto Blue Jays commercial has been blowing up on social media for its sheer horror, showing off that just-a-bit-off, uncanny valley effect that can make these automated facsimiles of human life so unsettling.
Josh Shiaman, a senior feature producer at TSN, set out to create a Jays ad using text-to-video AI generation, admitting that the results "did not go well."
Tried using Text-to-Video AI to generate a @BlueJays commercial and it...um...did not go well....🫤 pic.twitter.com/p3tzH9euUc
— Josh Shiaman (@JoshShiaman) June 8, 2023
Shiaman tells blogTO that the video "was a bit of an accident," created using an AI-based cloud editing program called RunwayML.
"My intent was just to experiment and create a commercial for Blue Jays baseball. But some of my benign prompts created some very horrifying (and unintentionally hilarious) results."
Shiaman says he used a fairly simple text prompt, entering "Young Blue Jays fans eating hot dogs with ketchup and mustard," and would shortly thereafter conclude that the "AI interpretation went somewhat askew."
The video starts out innocently enough, showing fans excited over tickets to a ballgame and a sequence of realistic-enough-looking stadium crowd shots before devolving into what I can only describe as a panicked Lovecraftian hellscape with the pacing and imagery of a childhood night terror.
The bizarre imagery is all set to the familiar tune of the seventh-inning stretch banger, OK Blue Jays, which, honestly, makes it even more upsetting.
Among the more puzzling images in the video, there is a slow-motion clip of almost alien-looking arms with morphing muscles, a child chugging what appears to be a sentient cup of beer, kids drinking from ketchup and mustard geysers, batting helmets that spew cherry slushies, and ketchup-stained youngsters eating a hot dog that is most certainly aware that it is being consumed alive.
I just wanted to show happy kids eating hot dogs at a ballgame. It went sideways.
— Josh Shiaman (@JoshShiaman) June 8, 2023
The horror level is turned up to the max towards the end of the video, where the music slows down, the food begins to sizzle and smoke, an inexplicable creature made of fingers and teeth appears, and then the stadium just full-on explodes.
Viewers of the video are reacting with sheer horror, many wishing they could unsee the otherworldly terrors just witnessed.
Josh. I am never going to be able to unsee this. It’s worse than a fevered dream.
— MRob (@MarissaRoberto) June 8, 2023
Others have latched onto the weird Jays logo shown in the video, and it looks like one viewer even went so far as to offer t-shirts for sale with the not-even-close emblem.
— cute tweets (@1concepcional) June 8, 2023
The video has drawn in close to 500k views and almost 2,400 likes on Twitter as of writing, as the masses consume the horrorshow that is the AI Blue Jays.
@JoshShiaman/Twitter
