Video of the Week: McDonalds AI

It's not +that+ bad ... is it??

McDonalds pulled this ad this week, a day after it was released when they got serious heat from the anti-AI brigade. Whilst it's not perfect - the lady getting her bags trapped in a bus door is uncomfortably bad - much of it is actually pretty fun.

The reactionary nature of this is what's most fascinating right now. A perfectly fine advert is pulled by a multinational because some very loud people object to some components of its creation. But we live in a world where most of our food is factory-produced not cooked over a fire, where many of our interactions take place over fibre-optic cables not in person, where light is created by electricity not the sun and we travel in combustion-driven cars not on foot.

Soon - very soon - we're going to be using artificial intelligence to inform a vast amount of what we do, as we use artificial light, noise, transport and food without a second thought already. Humanity is the story of a singular set of creatures using technology to compound their evolution. This narrative is going to continue.

One day we'll look back on this as a quaint moment akin to the Luddites raging against the spinning jenny. Until then, expect to see this push-pull of traditional v progressive vested-interests play out more often. AI isn't perfect, for sure - but even fire still burns people and no one would argue that it hasn't been net-positive for humanity overall ...