Hot Take: OpenAI Offers Pointillist Chronicle of Human Ingenuity
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The Ad:
For a company that has creative professionals fearing for their livelihood, OpenAI sure makes a compelling ad. The company behind the generative artificial intelligence product ChatGPT unveiled its first Super Bowl ad during the second quarter of Super Bowl 59. The one-minute spot, produced in collaboration with Accenture Song and Droga5, has an ambitious remit: chronicle the evolution of information throughout human history. The ad, titled “The Intelligence Age,” is tasked with no less than distilling progress into a series of static images.
It does so in a distinctive aesthetic, a collection of black and white dots whose assemblage grows increasingly more complex. It starts with a simple dyad—two dots interacting with one another—and gradually builds into a procession of visuals charting the history of human curiosity. As the dots compound, the images they create grow more sophisticated. A fire turns into a wheel, then horses, then agriculture, and eventually, sea travel. Within seconds, the swarm of dots take on a pointillist feel, portraying increasingly complicated images including a double helix, televised newscast, and eventually, the internet itself.
The ad ends with a chorus of multilingual voices interacting with ChatGPT, asking it to perform various tasks for it. It crescendos into a question: What do you want to create next?
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My Hot Take:
ChatGPT has made few friends in the creative industry precisely because it threatens to take their jobs. But after this ad, I just might welcome my robot overlords. The visual identity of the ad is distinct and immediately recognizable. The dots that make up the images represent something between an atom and a data point—the building block of any idea.
But when combined in animated tapestries, the dots take on a painterly feel, similar to that of an Impressionist work. They combine into hyper-detailed panoramas, each of which reflects a key milestone in human progress. It is no small feat to try to chronicle all of human history in 60 seconds, and it takes no small amount of self-confidence to position your product as the successor to space exploration. But that is exactly what OpenAI has done with its spot, and with style to spare.
Watch OpenAI’s Super Bowl 59 ad below.
