No Farting Around: AI-Generated Drug Commercial Takes on Scourge of Flatulence
A few weeks ago, we reported on a hilarious pepperoni hugspot pizza commercial generated by an AI tool. AI tools include ChatGPT for scripts, Runway ML Gen-2 for video clips, and his Eleven Labs for narration. Well, the author, who goes by the handle Pizza Later, is back with a commercial for a fictional drug called FlatuLess. This drug does exactly what its name suggests.
As with the previous commercial, Pizza Later generated different elements in different programs and stitched them together using Adobe After Effects. Additionally, the author emailed me to tell me that they used it. Red Giant VHS Filter This is to give the video an old-fashioned look.
This commercial introduces viewers to FlatuLess, a ‘special fart-free medicine’. With AI-generated images of people living their best lives (presumably after taking drugs), with a melodramatic piano soundtrack and very clumsy grammar that sounds like it’s been translated into English from another language. Written narration entertains us.
However, if you’ve used ChatGPT, Google Bard, or any other AI chatbot, you might be wondering, “Why is the bot writing in broken English?” After all, most chatbots are very good at constructing grammatical sentences. They don’t, by default, output things like “FlatuLess works in your body to reduce gas and give you confidence that will last a lifetime.”
When I asked Pizza Later about this awkward structure, he referred me to a friend known by the nickname DakisDead who used Google Bard for scripting to help. Dak said he intentionally designed the prompt to achieve such a structure.
“AI is good at creating initial passthroughs with prompts like ‘broken English’ and ‘add grammatical error,’” Duck said. “When you collapse, you’ll see prompts like ‘include definite article’ to make the output easier to read.”
Dak also said it took a lot of trying to get the output from the chatbot, which was really interesting. For example, at the end of the video, the script refers to doctors as “medical magicians.” Duck said he used prompts like “Suggest his 10 different alternatives to the word ‘doctor’ and have them goofy” to get that output.
Similar to the original pepperoni hugspot commercial, the people in the FlatuLess ad seem to live in the heart of the uncanny valley. Many of them have awkward dead eyes or body parts that somehow contradict reality.
We had a good laugh watching this video (and we hope you do too), but there are some serious lessons about the state of AI. AI is clearly good at generating music and emotional human voices. It’s hard to tell if the script is “good” because the human creator deliberately designed it to sound crappy.
However, one area where AI cannot fool anyone is the text-to-video generation used for the visual portion of commercials. For example, Pizza Later used Runway ML Gen-2. While this is very impressive, it produces clips that are only 4-5 seconds long and has nasty issues like objects melting into each other and people with malformed eyes and mouths. We tested Runway ML Gen-2 recently and were excited about its potential, but real-life actors aren’t out of work anytime soon.
For example, in this frame, people who are supposed to be building a campfire appear to be setting themselves on fire.
It’s also important to note that Pizza Rater and Duck had to do a tremendous amount of human work to make this commercial. I had to generate assets and scripts from 5 different AI programs and piece them all together. There’s no way you can get this length and quality by telling a bot to “make a funny fart pot commercial.”
