Month: February 2024

Super Bowl LXVII: LXRIP Commercials

Every year I do a review of the commercials that air during the Super Bowl – but does it even matter this year?

Travis Kelce, labeled "The Super Bowl," kisses Taylor Swift, labeled "The Ad Industry"
Power couple

Every year, more people cut the cable and join streaming services. That doesn’t have to be the death of commercials as we know them (most services have a lower price tier with commercials just like on regular TV), but it does mean the advertising industry has to rethink how it gets its message out. So how did it go?

The coveted first spot on the Paramount Plus online broadcast went to Universal Studios, with a trailer for Wicked (the commercials might have been different on local TV or on Nickelodeon, I don’t know). The second spot was for I don’t even remember, which is a bad sign.

This is actually a photo of Tom Brady (see what I did there?)
Congratulations to Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs (lol wrong photo but is there even any difference anymore?)

As soon as I saw the third commercial, a house ad for CBS, I knew that it did not go well. Super Bowl ads this year cost an average $7,000,000, which the most anyone has paid for 30 seconds of content since the Jets signed Aaron Rodgers (thanks to Jimmy Fallon’s writers via my friend Chris for this cheap joke). If CBS was airing an ad for themselves, then either they intentionally paid themselves $7,000,000 – or, more likely, they couldn’t sell the pricey third ad of the broadcast, and the ad industry is in deep trouble.

And so it continued, disappointing commercial after disappointing commercial.

Honorablish Mentions

The recurring bit for State Farm with Arnold Schwarzenegger was a bust: lol foreign guy can’t say r. Nothing wrong with it, except it wasn’t funny. Ben Affleck sold donuts. Beyoncé didn’t break the Internet. Michael Cera was somehow creepy. Homes.com did… something? Apartments.com did… something? With Jeff Goldblum? Didn’t understand, didn’t care.

Glen Powell in Hidden Figures, Top Gun Maverick, Devotion, and Twisters
Coming soon to theaters: MOVIE!, starring Glen Powell as Glen Powell

Then there was the DoorDash All the Ads commercial, which was supposed to promote engagement, like the McDonald’s record commercial did in the 80s. Except: was I supposed to remember all that? Did I know tell me I was supposed to remember all that? And most importantly, did I care that I was supposed to remember all that, no matter how much I would win? won or how much I would win because, you know, Super Bowl.

Then there was the political spot for RFK Junior. Hey, did you know he’s a Kennedy? That’s it, that’s the tweet. The ad is really going to confuse future historians someday – unless, oh G-d please no, he wins.

That just leaves the winners, the best of the worst.

3. Bud Light: Easy Night Out (The Genie)

And only because Post Malone wished for a T-Rex.

2. Wicked

This looks like a really cool movie. I can’t wait to see it. Do I really have to wait until Thanksgiving to see it? And if Universal is committing to it enough to spend $7,000,000 on a single ad nine months before the premiere, it better be good.

1. Twisters

The original Twister movie turns 28 in two months. Did we really need a sequel? If the trailer is anything to go by, hell yes we did. This looks like an amazing movie. And Glen Powell (you may remember him as John Young from Hidden Figures and Hangman from Top Gun: Maverick) is absolutely perfect casting for the Bill Paxton role.

And that’s it, until next year. Congratulations to the New England Patriots on winning the Super Bowl! I know it’s the Chiefs, but doesn’t it feel exactly the same?

AI for stupid on Super Bowl Sunday

Headshot of Lamar Jackson with the media.io AI gender swap filter applied
2023 NFL Season MVP Lamar Jackson’s AI-generated prediction as a woman

Happy Super Bowl Sunday!

You probably have so many questions for this weekend. Who will win? What will be the best storylines? Who will have the best commercial? How many times will the CBS broadcast show Taylor Swift? What would each NFL team’s starting quarterback look like as a woman? Wait, what?

A new tool has emerged to answer these questions that are so stupid you never thought to ask: Artificial Intelligence (AI). And it’s really good. I’ll explain what I did, how it worked, and why you should care. Then I’ll start to reveal what each gender-swapped quarterback might look like. I could show them all to you now… or I could show them a few at a time and generate cheap new content for months. As a blogger, the choice is obvious.

But, it’s Super Bowl Sunday, so I will show what tonight’s two starting quarterbacks would look like. Read to the end to find out.

What I Did

I used the Gender Swap option of the Media.IO AI Face Editor. I downloaded the official headshots of each starting quarterback from nfl.com, uploaded them to the face editor, ran the filter, and downloaded the results.

I wanted to demonstrate the technology by showing a nightmare fuel example contrasted with a really convincing example – but they were all pretty convincing. The worst result I could get was for Indianapolis Colts quarterback Gardner Minshew, for reasons that will be obvious once you see the official NFL.com headshot of Gardner Minshew on the left below. The image on the right shows an AI-generated estimate of what Minshew would look like as a woman – and honestly, it’s not that bad.

Original
AI-generated

The photo looks a bit strange, but it definitely looks like a real photo of a real woman. If this is the worst the technology could do, then it must work pretty well.

How It Works

What’s going on here? Nothing magical. It’s just a computer program designed to read faces. A human face, man or woman, has lots of features that can be measured. What’s the distance between your eyes? What angle does your the bridge of your nose make relative to the rest of your face? There are thousands of such measurements, some of which might never occur to you, and every face has different measurements. And the program underlying the AI Face Editor has seen billions of faces.

All it’s doing is looking at the facial features of these photos. When it sees a photo of me or Gardner Minshew or you (if you’re a woman, with all necessary changes), it makes those measurements and compares it to measurements on the billions of men’s faces it has seen before. It then reads through the many women’s faces that it has seen before. It then does a Lot of Math (that I won’t pretend to understand) to predict, based on billions of faces, what a woman’s face with equivalent features would look like.

All that the AI program is doing is making a prediction based on known data. It’s the next step in the evolution of big data – which is why I find it so fascinating.

Why You Should Care

You should care because it is so good. And it keeps getting better.

Headshot of Lamar Jackson with the 2017-era FaceApp gender swap filter applied
Gardner Minshew from 2021-era Face app AI lol

You might remember FaceApp, which was popular on Facebook for a few years after its release in 2017. It did… not as good. To the right (or above if you’re on a phone) is what FaceApp did with Gardner Minshew’s official nfl.com headshot.

This – THIS was nightmare fuel! *chef’s kiss*

In fact, my original plan for this post was to use FaceApp. But as soon as I used the Media.io AI gender swap filter, I saw how far the technology had come, and this became a very different post.

If this is how far the technology has come in the seven years since 2017, what will it look like in 2031?

And it’s not just face editing. Artificial Intelligence prediction tools are changing many areas of modern life – especially the best general purpose tool (for now), ChatGPT. But more on that one later.

This technology has the potential to make just as big a change to society as the Internet did starting in the 1990s. Is it going to change society for the better or for the worse? It’s up to us.

Today’s Game

But for tonight, enjoy the Big Game. Here, presented Street Fighter style, are the AI-generated gender swapped quarterbacks for each team: Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs and Brock Purdy of the San Francisco 49ers:

Who will win the game? Here is my official prediction:

Taylor Swift’s Publicist

*Caution: Any comments that try to make this about women’s sports or transgender people will be immediately yeeted into the Sun