If you’re having a stressful holiday season, the answer is McDonald’s — at least, that’s what a now-removed AI-generated ad suggested.

Set to a song calling holiday season “the most terrible time of the year,” the ad shows AI-generated people falling victim to a slew of wintery woes, including family dinners, shopping, caroling, baking cookies, and putting up a Christmas tree, each of which goes wrong somehow. The ad concludes by telling viewers to “hide out in McDonald’s until January’s here.”

The ad for McDonald’s Netherlands has been delisted on YouTube, although it’s also been reposted elsewhere on social media, where the comments are largely negative, criticizing not just the use of AI, but the quality and message of the ad, as well. That backlash might not be surprising considering the response to Coca-Cola’s most recent AI-generated holiday ad.

However, unlike Coca-Cola’s ad, the McDonald’s ad took the risk of including people, rather than just cartoon forest critters. Most of the people in the ad aren’t seen again and some of the shots are a bit off, like one showing a person falling while ice skating, only for their limbs to turn jelly-like halfway through.

In a post on LinkedIn, The Gardening.club, the AI division of The Sweetshop, the studio behind the ad, said the ad took them “seven intense weeks” to create. They even admitted “the man-hours poured into this film were more than a traditional production.”

Melanie Bridge, CEO of The Sweetshop, shared similar comments in a post on Instagram, saying, “The hours that went into this job far exceeded a traditional shoot. Ten people, five weeks, full-time. Blood, sweat, tears, and an honestly ridiculous amount of coaxing to get the models to behave and to honor the creative brief shot by shot.”

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• Stevie Bonifield