Toys R Us has partnered with ad agency Native Foreign to create what it claims is the first-ever “branded film” using OpenAI’s new text-to-video conversion tool, Sora, and the creepy result has been met with widespread derision on social media.
Ars Technical Reports Retail giant Toys “R” Us has taken a surprising step towards the future of advertising by leveraging OpenAI’s text-to-video technology Sora to create a unique commercial. Titled “The Origins of Toys ‘R’ Us,” the commercial aims to tell the story of the company’s founder, Charles Lazarus, through AI-generated video clips. The creative endeavor showcases Sora’s potential to create videos up to one minute long featuring realistic scenes and multiple characters generated from text instructions.
Toys”R”Us releases first brand commercial generated with OpenAI SORA
Here we see a commercial use case for generative AI. pic.twitter.com/rfbHC3NQRD
— Allen T. (@Mr_AllenT) June 25, 2024
Kim Miller Orko, president of Toys R Us Studios and executive producer on the project, was excited about the collaboration, saying, “Charles Lazarus was a visionary ahead of his time, and we wanted to celebrate his achievements with a cutting edge technological spot.”
The video sees a child version of Lazarus, presumably generated by Sora, fall asleep and travel through a dreamland of toys. During this adventure, young Lazarus meets Jeffrey, Toys R Us’ iconic mascot, and is gifted a little red car, a symbolic act that represents the birth of a retail empire.
While the use of AI in advertising isn’t entirely new, the Toys “R” Us commercial marks a major step forward in terms of complexity and ambition. However, the video lacks obvious signs of AI generation. Keen observers note unnatural movements, strange visual artifacts, and irregularities in certain elements, such as the glasses, all of which are hallmarks of current AI-generated imagery.
This AI-generated commercial has received mixed reviews, with some praising the innovative approach and others criticizing various aspects of its production and impact. Critics have expressed concerns about the potential loss of creative human jobs, the environmental impact of energy-hungry AI models, and the use of human-made artwork to train these AI systems.
Comedy writer Mike Drucker summed up some of the criticism in a post on social media platform X, saying, “I love that this commercial says, ‘Toys R Us was started by the dream of a little boy who wanted to share his imagination with the world. And to show how we did it, we fired our artists, used server farms, dried up Lake Superior, and created the world of Stephen King’s nightmare.”
The commercial begins, “Toys R Us started with one little boy’s dream to share his imagination with the world. And to show how we could do it, we fired our artists, dried up Lake Superior using server farms and created the world of Stephen King’s nightmares. https://t.co/RBPoH0ax5o
—Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) June 26, 2024
Despite the criticism, it’s worth noting that the branded film still required a significant amount of human effort in its creation. While Sora eliminated the need for actors and cameras, human writers and VFX artists were involved in the process to refine and enhance the AI-generated content. Toys “R” Us acknowledged this in a press release, stating, “The branded film was created almost entirely in Sora, with some touch-up VFX and an original musical score composed by Aaron Marsh of the well-known indie rock band Copeland.”
The hybrid approach of AI generation and human post-production isn’t unique to the Toys R Us project: other notable Sora-generated videos, such as “Air Head,” a short film featuring shy kids, also required significant human intervention to achieve the desired results. fxguide’s Mike Seymour reports that the creation of “Air Head” required a significant amount of editing and post-production work, including removing unwanted elements and artifacts from the AI-generated footage.
As the technology continues to evolve, some industry insiders predict that AI-generated content will become increasingly prevalent in advertising. Advertising copywriter Dan Goldgeyer commented on social media: “You can copy Toys’R’Us’ AI spots all you want, but this is just the beginning. Most consumers won’t notice or care about the difference, and most marketers would be happy to produce these types of spots for less money.”
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering free speech and online censorship.
