The Most Shameful Uses Of AI In Commercials In 2025
The ad industry saw it coming from afar, and so did Big Tech pundits and any person who is connected to the fabric of the internet and social media. AI made a big splash at the Super Bowl 59 fest. Some tried to pass it off as a compassionate agent for human emotional needs. Others hawked a playful side of it atop fancy glasses. From travel companies touting their AI trip planner to Salesforce, top dollars were spent by mega-corporations to regale the virtues of an innovation that poses a tangible threat to human livelihoods. Of course, its ilk can occasionally get a few facts wrong or even spill the recipe for cooking up bioweapons, but in the grander scheme of billion-dollar balance sheets, we are expected to play along with the daydreams of a helpful digital assistant.
Google's Missteps
Google, one of the biggest wolves in the AI domain, flubbed with a cheese fact and then silently erased the evidence of its Gemini AI fumbling. No public admission was made. But yeah, some expert scriptwriter was paid to write a deeply emotional ad spot for the same AI to market its appeal. It's a shameful game, but one that went on brazenly. Google set the AI tone with an ad that focused more on real struggles than the two products it was trying to sell — the Gemini AI and its Pixel smartphones.
Privacy Concerns
Let's start with the impact of such relationships, which teeter on the edge of an anthropomorphized virtual companionship. Here's what OpenAI, the company which started the whole AI chatbot trend, had to say following comprehensive research: "Human-like socialization with an AI model may produce externalities impacting human-to-human interactions. For instance, users might form social relationships with the AI, reducing their need for human interaction — potentially benefiting lonely individuals but possibly affecting healthy relationships." According to experts at Pace University, forming a rewarding connection with an AI agent requires sharing a lot of personal information to really get the desired output.
Meta's Privacy Concerns
Talking about privacy and safety, and their intersection with AI, we have Meta. The company aired a Super Bowl ad hawking the eponymous Meta AI aboard the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses. If the Cambridge Analytica scandal has taught us anything, it's that Meta is no shining knight of data privacy.
Holland America's Use of AI
For a company that's all about cruise fun, giving humans the recreational pleasure of exploration, an ad chock-full of AI was as antithetical as it gets. The cruise company relied on video-generation AI tools such as OpenAI's Sora engine and other upstarts like Midjourney and Runway to concoct it.
OpenAI's ChatGPT AI Assistant
What do milestones like mankind learning to hunt, igniting fire, inventing the wheel, domesticating the horse, naval exploration, running steam-powered rail engine, discovering the light bulb, making the internet, landing on the moon, and creating nanometer-scale silicon chips have in common? Certainly not an AI chatbot aping the voice of a human female. Yes, ChatGPT kickstarted the whole AI chatbot and generative AI industry on a commercial level.
