Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think
A new AI-produced commercial from Lexus shows how AI might be particularly suited for the advertising industry.
- The commercial was written by IBM’s Watson. It was acted and directed by humans.
- Lexus says humans played a minimal part in influencing Watson, in terms of the writing.
- Advertising, with its clearly defined goals and troves of data, seems like one creative field in which AI would prove particularly useful.
IBM’s Watson supercomputer is the author of a script recently used in a Lexus commercial, marking a first for the advertising and AI industries.
To create the commercial, which was acted and directed by humans, Watson was given 15 years’ worth of award-winning commercials, a trove of data showing when consumers tended to connect most emotionally with advertisements, and further data from an experiment conducted by the University of New South Wales’ MindX, which analyzed how highly intuitive people respond to car advertising.
Strangely, the ad is about a car that’s about to be destroyed by humans but manages to save itself through its sentience.
It depicts an emotional Takumi (Japanese artisan) expressing a silent goodbye to the AI-equipped Lexus he created. The car ventures out into the world, but dark clouds soon appear. It becomes clear the Lexus must undergo a crash test in a menacing facility, which it passes by using its AI-equipped braking system, much to the relief of the Takumi watching the test on TV at home.
“When I was handed the script, the melodrama of the story convinced me of its potential,” director Kevin Macdonald, who’s directed films such as The Last King of Scotland and State of Play, said in a statement. “The fact that AI gave a fellow machine sentience,…
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