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When Heinz asked A.I. for a Ketchup Commercial
Artificial Intelligence has become something of a buzzword, companies, politicians and even ordinary people use the term sometimes out of deep FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). The emergence of technology has led to all sorts of situations and brands taking advantage of using this technology in a creative way. I chose to discuss the case where the people from Heinz asked artificial intelligence to generate a ketchup commercial. I think it is a relevant example to show how machine learning algorithms work and why it is important to understand how it works.
How does it work?
The simplest way to explain machine learning is that the computer learns from examples and gets better and better at performing a task without being told directly what to do. For example, when a computer learns to recognize a dog, the computer is given plenty of images of dogs, after which it learns their characteristics and recognizes a dog when it sees one. In the case of the Heinz ad, it is possible that the machine learning was trained with a multitude of images containing the shape of Heinz Ketchup. In conclusion, machine learning is dependent on the data it is trained with.
How did the campaign unfold?
According to Campaign of The World, the Heinz campaign used DALL-E 2 software to generate a multitude of variations in which they wanted to show that the way a bottle of Ketchup is depicted by A.I. is similar to a bottle of Heinz every time. They searched for all sorts of variations that didn’t include the phrase Heinz, but the prompts included examples like Ketchup in outer space, ketchup scuba diving, etc. Fans were then involved in the creation process, and subsequently, the best prompts were turned into advertising images either on social media or posters, making it the first campaign to make full use of AI-generated images.
I tried it myself, what was the result?
The first prompt used was: ketchup bottle, by surrealist, Salvador Dalí. Of the four photos generated, only one resembled a Heinz bottle. The style was not painterly, but the prompt meets my requirement, using a certain…
