Why the New Sora/AI Toys "R" Us Ad Doesn't Have Me Scared
And what humans did to make the ad presentable
Hi there, I'm Shawna! For more than a decade, I've been leading teams of Post Professionals through the wild ride of showbiz. Through the successful delivery of over 300 hours of television and numerous feature films, I've honed my craft. My goal is to share helpful insights that might make someone else's journey just bit smoother.
First of all this whole ad wouldn’t have been possible without humans producing it…and fixing it.
AI is not even close to perfect. It can’t predict nuance or understand, why something that looks like a human can immediately be tagged as ‘off’ or ‘weird’ to the viewer. After reading Fast Company’s article, linked here, I was very happy to see their take on this ad.
There were indeed humans who worked on the ad, but let’s talk about who all might have lost work from it.
Actors, crew members of all kinds, and some post crew. They didn’t need actors, set designers, costume designers, camera crew, lighting, crafty, and everyone else who works on set. They didn’t need a line producer or someone to schedule the shoot and prep everyone. To get this level of ad would have cost millions. Instead Kim Miller Olko who is current CMP of Toys “R” Us (TRU) and President of the newly established Toys “R” Us Studios decided to be the first to launch a highly controversial ad and pounce on all the media it would garner. Olko’s bio reads “she is a four-time Emmy Award winner with 20+ years as a transformational media leader and brand storyteller.” From what I can tell these Emmy’s were garnered while working on shows with Martha Stewart.
Olko served as executive producer on the ad while it was directed by Native Foreign’s CCO Nik Kleverov. Whose bio reads “Emmy Recognized” in a thinly veiled way to say he didn’t win the Emmy he was nominated for in contributing to the Narcos series title. That’s not a knock, it’s just a wink, I see what you did there 😉.
All this to say the ad was helmed by some pretty big creative hitters in the AI industry.
Kleverov spoke with Creativity Squared about his experience getting to work with Sora on the TRU Ad. He feels Sora is a way to get out all the creative things he has in his head but without having to go through raising funds and pitching in order to get it created. Also allowing him to create things that seem like it would NEVER get funded. I think it can be used for story boarding or getting difficult sequences choreographed before shooting. I think there are lots of great creative ways to use the technology responsibly.
It is this exact thinking that has me excited about AI and Sora and what they can do for the film and TV industry. It will help those of us who would never get a chance to get some of our creative dreams actually out of our heads. That said, we do need to talk about how far and how fast this technology will go and what impact it will have on real humans who will lose work from this technology.
Kleverov says he doesn’t need it to be 100% done out of the engine, they’ll fix it in post. So who all did work on the project? Well a whole ton of Post Production Professionals! There were VFX artists who had to correct issues in the Sora generated imagery, colorists to get the color completely seamless among all the different generated images (which if you’ve spent any time at all generating with AI you’ll know is a very interesting quirk.) Editors, Assisted Editors, and Audio mixing, I know I’m missing some but that’s the overall gist. AI is far from perfect and it still takes real people to even get it to a semblance of “good.”
Now I’ll delve into the ad itself, which was flat out creepy. The music was awful, the VO was eery, and the ‘human’ like figures represented in the ad, as well as the toys, were all just off. Kleverov mentions being criticized for these imperfections and says that life isn’t perfect, “there’s a smudge on the wall, a hair on the couch” so no matter what clean up work has to be done. I think the issue is that we’re learning about how humans process imagery in a way we’ve never explored before. We’ve taken for granted what is “real” and if there are enough real imagery in huge CGI films we believe it. Not to mention that a lot of large scale films actually take real life imagery of things then super impose it in post. With this ad though, 100% of it is fake, and that messes with our minds.
He says in the future AI tools will be a tool in our tool chest. Just like non-linear editing programs were such a huge shift in the industry in the early 90’s AI is absolutely changing the way we do work. It’s all about how we ETHICALLY implement these tools. We all want to spend more time doing creative tasks vs menial tasks. No one wants to spend hours rotoscoping out in-ear monitors on actors. So how do we hold each other accountable, help those who are currently in the industry worried about losing work to see the benefit of these tools amongst all of the scary talk that is being pushed around this technology.
Start with transparency, in that sense I’m glad TRU was honest with how the ad was created. The more we’re up front and honest with how we use tech the less taboo it will become.
FUN FACT: The very first Adobe Premiere Pro I worked on looked like this 😂
Until next time,
Shawna Carroll