Social media users criticize Coca-Cola over an AI-generated Christmas video; many creatives say it is distasteful to use AI tech instead of the work of artists
The video was meant to pay homage to a classic 1995 Coca-Cola commercial. — Coca-Cola is facing backlash online …
NBC NewsBruna Horvath
Context & Ripple Effects
Coca-Cola’s attempt to reinterpret a well-known holiday creative asset with AI put the technology into a high-visibility brand setting, where creative labor and authenticity are part of the message as much as the finished video. The criticism also fits a wider creator concern that people increasingly must prove their work is human as synthetic production becomes more convincing.
Later coverage shows the issue was not isolated: Coca-Cola returned to AI holiday advertising despite the earlier criticism, while McDonald’s Netherlands ultimately pulled an AI Christmas ad after backlash. That makes this an early test of whether public resistance changes brand practice or merely raises the communications cost of using AI.
First-order effects
Coca-Cola faces immediate reputational pressure around a campaign designed to evoke a familiar holiday commercial, with criticism focused on replacing artists’ work with AI.
Creative professionals gain a prominent example for arguing that AI-led brand production can diminish perceived craft and alienate the audiences attached to legacy creative work.
Second-order effects
Agencies and consumer brands using generative tools must weigh production efficiency against the risk that AI disclosure—or visibly synthetic output—becomes the story rather than the campaign.
The backlash raises the value of human-made, human-led, or credibly disclosed creative production for brands whose advertising relies on nostalgia, emotional trust, and cultural recognition.
Third-order effects
If repeated cases produce similar reactions, commercial AI adoption in advertising is likely to bifurcate: AI may remain useful in production workflows while consumer-facing campaigns face tighter creative, disclosure, and brand-safety review.
The durable tension is not simply whether AI can generate ads, but whether scaled synthetic output erodes the human authorship and recognizable craft that established brands use to signal authenticity.
The trend: This is one data point in AI content commercialization, where cheaper synthetic production collides with consumer expectations of authentic creative labor and brand stewardship.
The company I work for, Silverside AI, just created an ad for @CocaCola (yes THE Coca-Cola)!! We were asked to bring the classic Coca Cola Holidays are Coming ad back through the use of AI. Check it out: [video]
More than anything, what makes the holiday season so special is that it highlights the humanity of togetherness. That's why we had ten thousand CPUs burp out sixty seconds of slop for your idiot minds.
calling it right now, 2024 was the year of slop. it's the year slop took over every facet of culture. google became slop. slop drowned out journalism. not just ai slop-there were slop games like Concord. movie slop like Borderlands. we let a slop ceo get a slop president elected
It's actually incredibly disingenuous to conceal the fact that this required an immense amount of post production with traditional animators to avoid existing false advertising laws, and so Coca-Cola's logo appeared correctly in every frame.
Coca-Cola doing a generative AI remake of I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke and immediately getting sued because all of the people were ripped straight out of Midsommar
Such a great example of how AI cannot generate new ideas but simply smush together what was previously created. Yes this looks like a poor imitation of the typical Coca-Cola Xmas commercial