Critics Slam AI-Generated Ad by OpenAI’s Sora

Toys “R” Us has faced a wave of criticism following the release of an advertisement entirely created using OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence tool, Sora.

The company specializes in retailing toys, clothing, and other children’s goods. The advertisement narrates the story of the firm’s founder, Charles Lazarus, and how the idea for the store came about.

The video is touted as “the world’s first branded film created using OpenAI’s new text-to-video tool, Sora.” For its development, the company partnered with the agency Native Foreign, which has access to the alpha version of the tool, not yet available to the general public.

“Charles Lazarus was a visionary ahead of his time, and we wanted to honor his legacy with a video using the most advanced technologies available,” noted Toys “R” Us Chief Marketing Officer Kim Miller Olko.

TOYS ‘R US released an AI commercial and it fucking sucks. pic.twitter.com/K1JcGhHKeA

— Joe Russo (@joerussotweets) June 25, 2024

“Toys “R” Us released an AI commercial, and it’s bloody awful,” commented “Avengers: Endgame” director Joe Russo.

Users criticized the advertisement from a technical standpoint, including noticeable changes in the character’s body and clothing features.

Just like a weird dream it is a different person each time you see them pic.twitter.com/5Vc85ElqO1

— syndrowm (@syndrowm) June 25, 2024

“Like in a strange dream, each time you see him, it’s a different person,” wrote user syndrowm.

One commentator expressed outrage that “marketers considered the video a good demonstration of their product’s soul,” calling it disgusting.

Former Ubisoft concept artist RJ Palmer highlighted the energy costs required to produce the video.

No aspect of this looks better than conventional tools yet it costs an order of magnitude more energy to produce. Even then you can still see where figures were crudely cut out from disparate sources to attempt a cohesive whole. There is fundamentally no benefit to this.

— RJ Palmer (@arvalis) June 25, 2024

“No aspect of this process looks better than traditional tools, yet it requires an order of magnitude more energy,” he wrote.

In May, the neural network Sora generated a music video for indie musician Washed Out.

As reported in a HarrisX survey, people struggled to distinguish camera-recorded videos from those created by OpenAI’s AI.