‘Tis the season for AI holiday commercials … at least, that’s what some are trying to tell us.

The writing has been on the wall for a while now. …

And no, there’s no going back. There’s no stopping this. Because again, creating with GenAI is a fraction of the cost of human-made content. So sit back, make some popcorn, and enjoy the future.

This is just a sample of the all-too familiar refrain expressed on X after McDonald’s became the latest corporation to release an advertisement entirely generated by AI.

Yet just because something is “inevitable” does not mean one has to “sit back” and “enjoy” it. This argument is disproven by reality itself, as McDonald’s pulled its AI ad after just a few days of intense backlash.

Techno-optimists are probably right that eventually AI will get so “good” that the average viewer won’t know the difference. But there’s still a vast difference between AI and human creations, for a human-made work of art will always contain the soul of the artist who made it, while a technically accurate AI-generated video will contain the soul of Sam Altman – essentially, none at all. That is why, no matter how good AI gets at deceiving you, it must still be resisted.

To create is to be human. It is what God does in the first chapter of the Bible, and what we, as creatures made in His image, do when we build families, start businesses, cook, design, and write a text message to a loved one. AI strips us of that creating power, all while claiming to free our time for other pursuits.

But what other pursuits? AI is consuming the pursuits that any sensible person would do with any extra spare time this technology may free up.

The tech-optimists are also right that the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and that AI will continue to be used by corporations looking to save a buck in one way or another. But the backlash against McDonald’s and its AI ad should teach us that we as consumers still hold the ultimate power to decide what companies brazenly present to us as artistic advertisement or product.

Not everyone backs down, of course. Coca-Cola’s AI-generated Christmas ad is still live. But one company backing down is better than none.

The point is, while AI-generated “artwork” may not ever be totally eradicated, it can be societally recognized as the sort of thing trashy companies do when they’re too miserly to pay an animator or an actor to make a film. An example of this is how some companies still rely on child labor. Companies that do so hide this fact in first-world countries. While the best option would be no sweat shops for children, the realities of craven materialism present such shame as the next best option. That same shame may be our best option for resisting AI.

Although AI’s long march through the corporations will work in some disheartening ways, it is still worthwhile to resist it, even if it so saturates the market that the most anti-AI person unknowingly supports it. And if we can’t destroy it at all, we can at least force it to the outskirts of society. We can make corporations ashamed that they would present a worse product to us just so that they can get a cheap robot to do what a thousand creative and talented people are dying to do. Maybe at that point, a counter revolution of actual human creativity will rise up so strong, that it will completely outshine the soulless slop which we are constantly told is “indistinguishable from human-made art.”

This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. 

Image credit: YouTube