McDonald's achieves AI apotheosis with a generative AI Christmas ad so utterly miserable, the production company responsible took down a statement defending it: This was 'an important learning,' McDonald's exec says, but what did we learn?

'The holidays suck ass and we'll be lucky to get out of them with our health and sanity intact, but at least we can shove some crappy fast food into our slack pieholes before the existential darkness claims us': That's the premise of a new McDonald's holiday ad that, as reported by the BBC, was quickly pulled after it went out because not only was it utterly miserable, it was also made entirely with generative AI.

"McDonald's unveiled what has to be the most god-awful ad I've seen this year—worse than Coca-Cola's," Theodore McKenzie of 80 Level wrote on X. "Fully AI-generated, that's one. Looks repulsive, that's two. More cynical about Christmas than the Grinch, that's three."

And then, in the true spirit of the holidays, he added, "I don't wanna be the only one suffering, take a look."

Some users had slightly more pointed thoughts about the whole thing.

The backlash was so furious that it not only forced the ad off the internet, but also a reported defense of the spot made by Melanie Bridge, CEO of The Sweetshop, the production company that actually made the thing. Fortunately, Futurism caught some bangin' quotes.

"For seven weeks, we hardly slept, with up to 10 of our in-house AI and post specialists at The Gardening Club [our in-house AI engine] working in lockstep with the directors," Bridge wrote.

"We generated what felt like dailies—thousands of takes—then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production. This wasn’t an AI trick. It was a film."

Bridge also said that this ad wasn't "a novelty or a cute seasonal experiment," and that really, you know, when you think about it, it's not really AI generated at all: "When craft and technology meet with intention, they can create work that feels genuinely cinematic. So no—AI didn’t make this film. We did."

Look, I don't necessarily think that forcing a team of 10 people to spend nearly two months of sleepless nights punching different variations of phrases into the plagiarism slop machine is an efficient and effective way to come up with 30 seconds of capitalist garbola. But on the other hand I also don't think that the holidays are a relentlessly shitty time that we'd all be better off without.

Maybe that's why I look so askance at corporate insistence on cranking out this crap despite the very clear fact that nobody likes or wants it. That AI-generated Coke ad McKenzie mentioned, for instance, is still online—it's at least superficially festive and doesn't look like it was conceived by someone who wants to beat their neighbor to death with a giant novelty candy cane—but it's currently wearing 184,000 dislikes on YouTube, compared to just 11,000 likes.

As for this McDonald's mess, a rep for McDonald's in the Netherlands, the division of the company the ad was made for, told the BBC the incident "serves as an important learning as we explore the effective use of AI." Somehow, I suspect nothing will be learned.