Hilariously disturbing AI-generated commercials are going viral

Text-to-video generators have become a thing, and companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta compete in this AI race. Although text-to-image generators are rapidly improving, those that turn our words into videos still have a long way to go.

But that’s not a bad thing. Thanks to text-to-video generators that are still far from perfect, we get to see some videos that are as hilarious as they are disturbing. Some AI-generated ads have recently started circulating online, quickly going viral for their quirkiness and the resemblance to our craziest dreams.

[Related reading: DIYP Quiz: AI or photo?]

But let’s start with the first text-to-video footage I saw on social media. Perhaps you’re familiar with this one: it shows Will Smith eating spaghetti. For some reason, AI still doesn’t know how eating spaghetti works, so it created this nightmarish video that you’ll never be able to unsee.

Judging from some images I’ve seen in AI groups I’m a member of, Midjourney still needs help figuring out how pizza works too. What is it with text-to-image generators and Italian food? While scrolling through Instagram a few days ago, I stumbled upon this pizza ad. When I decided to write this, it had already spread like wildfire, and everyone’s been reposting it for the last few days.

“Everything is AI from the VO to the video and images,” the ad maker, Pizza Later, writes on Twitter. He used ChatGPT 4 for the script (which explains the hilarious slogan “It’s like family but with more cheese”). He used Midjourney for images, Runway Gen2 for video clips, Eleven Labs for voiceover, and SOUNDRAW AI Music for the music. He assembled everything in After Effects, and we got this masterpiece.

But since pizza goes so well with beer, we’ve got one more viral AI commercial for you. Private Island made this one, and it’s even more messed up than the pizza ad. The creators used Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and ControlNet to get the final result. And it’s absolutely “cursed.”

The comments on these videos are almost as hilarious as the commercials themselves. Many people also say that these commercials remind them of their dreams, or at least the feeling they have while having a weird dream. I can relate to this as well, and it could be one of the reasons why these commercials have become so popular. They amuse us and make us uncomfortable at the same time – like strange dreams or bad horror movies.

I’m sure that, just like text-to-image, text-to-video generators will improve soon enough and create new opportunities as well as new problems. But until that happens, enjoy these cursed, weird, disturbing, and above all, hilarious videos people create using AI!