"Pepperoni Hug Spot" is a commercial created exclusively with AI tools that embodies all the whimsy of today's AI art, while potentially offering a glimpse into automated yet customized advertising and video content.
It took AI artist "Pizza Later," as he calls himself on Twitter, three hours to create his AI commercial for the fictional pizza restaurant chain "Pepperoni Hug Spot". The spot has all the clichés you'd expect from a conventional pizza ad. But it also has the bizarreness of today's AI art.
The latter brings it close to a Tarantino-style drug horror trip: edible plates, far too many fingers, mouths wide open, and "secret ingredient" toppings you'd rather not know about. See for yourself.
AI tools in concert
Beyond the extraordinary aesthetic of the video, the process used to create it is significant: Pizza Later says he used only AI tools to generate the content. Pizza Later then used Adobe After Effects to assemble all the assets.
Pizza Later used GPT-4 to generate the script, including the restaurant's name, "Pepperoni Hug Spot," and the thought-provoking tagline, "Like family, but with more cheese." In the prompt, Pizza Later specifically asked for a trashy script, a task that GPT-4 obviously performed well.
The images used in the spot (the pizza pattern and the exterior of the restaurant) were generated with Midjourney, and for the short video clips, Pizza Later used Runway Gen-2, a recently released text-to-video model.
The distinctive voice-over was also AI-voiced using the text-to-audio service Eleven Labs, while the music was created using Soundraw AI. The entire production process took about three hours, according to Pizza Later.
AI gets you to prototypes faster - and maybe more
In all its whimsy, the spot demonstrates the power of today's AI tools to quickly generate ideas and turn them into prototypes. As the visual quality and accuracy of text-to-video models continues to improve, generative AI could become a valuable tool in the video and advertising industries.
A commercial like "Pepperoni Hug Spot" could probably be better produced today using stock video from video databases. But AI tools offer more creative freedom than choosing from stock clips, where producers often play it safe and serve up clichés.
