“Tom the (AI) Turkey” from Google
We just witnessed a little social experiment and I don’t think we realized it and perhaps it wasn’t even intended as such.
Google just recently released an advertisement themed to Thanksgiving travel featuring an iconic holiday character … Tom the Turkey. I would start out to say the spot was well crafted, animated, voiced, and produced. Perfect, maybe not, but it did pull us right into the story of Tom needing to get away from the farm before Thanksgiving for all the obvious reasons, using Google to book his travel.
The one thing missing from the story is that the entire spot including the concepting, writing, and the entire production was all done by AI. Specifically Google’s AI product called Gemini AI. I am sure it was prompted by humans (would have to be, right?!?), but entirely conceived and produced by Gemini AI. And reported as the first time ever as such.
But not disclosed as such, and that is the social experiment that people are speculating … would people notice it’s all AI? Would people comment? Would people care?
I certainly do! Wouldn’t you be surprised if otherwise?!?
I think it’s safe to say that people commented and cared. From my perspective, people commented and cared most about the fact that the use of AI wasn’t disclosed … that the spot was entirely AI generated.
We are in the age of desired transparency and that’s what counts above all else. People simply want to know. And the fact that the spot was about Thanksgiving, which is a holiday of human togetherness, made it that much more important to disclose.
There were also lots of comments about the creativity of Tom the Turkey itself, but I’ll leave that to personal points of view. For me it is all about how we use AI and how we disclose the use of it. This social experiment, whether intended or not, shows the importance of honesty and transparency in its use and also honestly in sharing how we are using it so that we can all learn from it.
Let’s all learn from each other in how we are using AI so we can in fact productively advance our craft and industry together. This is an advance right here, let’s learn from it and from each other. We just learned that transparency counts and we just learned perhaps the importance of disclosing the use of AI. Great.
I thank Google for this advancement and this learning opportunity, how else do we grow?!?
What’s your experience? JIM