The worst branding blunders of the AI era—so far

Read original article

Plenty of brands seem eager to signal their artificial intelligence chops these days—maybe too eager. Consider Toys “R” Us. It set out to grab attention at the recent Cannes Lions festival, and beyond, with a bold example of AI as a creative tool. And what it touted as the first brand video generated with AI certainly got a strong reaction. In short, many found it creepy and off-putting, as well as a slight to human ad creatives. Jeff Beer, Fast Company‘s senior staff editor covering advertising and branding, pronounced it an “abomination.”

In fact, the spot’s dreamy depiction of the chain’s origin story, made with OpenAI’s text-to-video tool, Sora, became just the latest example of a brand scrambling to embrace—and being seen to embrace—AI’s potential, and basically stepping on a rake. It should be (yet another) reminder of what brands have to lose in the rush to do something, anything, involving AI. Whatever the ambition, it ended up the most recent high-profile entry on the roster of the biggest brand mistakes of the AI era. So far.

But it certainly has a wide variety of company. Just a few weeks ago, McDonald’s pulled the plug on an experiment with AI handling drive-through orders. The system’s botched interpretations of certain orders—mistakenly accepting that customers had asked for hundreds of McNuggets or ice cream with bacon on it—went viral on social media. The burger giant announced it would “explore voice-ordering solutions more broadly,” essentially conceding that the technology’s not ready for prime time just yet.

(McDonald’s wasn’t the only brand burned by the incident; the episode was also a bad look for IBM, McDonald’s tech partner on the effort.)