The Spin received quite a few interesting submissions during the month of May, beginning with an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered advertisement by Coca-Cola, which contains not just one, but two blunders.
The idea of the campaign was to show how the brand has been referenced in several old novels. The hero film shows passages from these novels being keyed out on a typewriter from an author’s point of view. Except, where Coca-Cola is mentioned in the original novels, the company replaces the typewritten font with the brand’s iconic red logo. So far, so good? Things get interesting when the ad references Stephen King’s The Shining and V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas to shine a light on its history and heritage, but then also references Extreme Metaphors by J.G. Ballard. The mistake? This is an AI hallucination.
The AI engine failed to recognise that the book Extreme Metaphors – Collected Interviews – J.G. Ballard is not actually written by J.G. Ballard. It is a compilation of interviewers with J.G. Ballard edited by Dan O’Hara and Simon Sellars, which was published three years after the author’s death. What’s worse? The ad misspells Shanghai as ‘Shangai’ while pretending to be writing as the author – a mistake that J.G. Ballard would probably never make, given that he was born there.
Moving from AI-powered videos to AI-powered pictures, a local Chinese-language newspaper in Malaysia made the news for printing an inaccurate Malaysian flag – which is clearly a big deal, given that it’s printed and distributed in the country.
When the newspaper was reprimanded for the mistake, it admitted that the error originated because of an AI-generated image that was not corrected at the editing phase. The consequence? Both the executive editor in chief and the deputy chief sub-editor were suspended. The lesson in it for all of us? Human intervention remains critical even if we lean into AI as a tool to aid us in our roles.
Another AI-generated image released on the Fourth of July by the official White House X (formerly Twitter) account portrayed a beefed up US President Donald Trump holding a lightsaber. While the White House post took the “Happy May the 4th” opportunity to advertise their fight against ‘Sith Lords’, several hundred Star Wars fans stepped in to point out the irony of post. The AI-generated image shows the US President in a jedi costume holding a red lightsaber – which essentially portrays him as a Sith Lord on the Dark Side.
Guess that backfired.
Also in the news this month was a disgruntled Rhode Island customer who bought the “Inauguration First Lady” model limited-edition collector’s item watch for his wife from GetTrumpWatches.com, which features Donald Trump’s signature and the Trump brand on the bright pink bezel and dial.
However, when the watch arrived, it unfortunately read ‘Rump’, with the ‘T’ absent on the product.
The website was quick to clarify that although it uses the US President’s status to market and sell its inventory, the timepieces are not “designed, manufactured, distributed or sold by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organisation or any of their respective affiliates or principals.”
The final submission for the month comes in from India, where two competing national dailies carried the exact same headline on their front pages to congratulate the chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu – except one of these headlines has a glaring typo. Let us know when you spot it.
