New Lexus ES Commercial Written Entirely by Artificial Intelligence

Posted by Kevin on November 19th, 2018

Lexus has debuted a commercial written completely by artificial intelligence, and it’s strangely compelling:

Built by technical partner Visual Voice with support from IBM Watson, the AI was trained with fifteen years of award-winning luxury commercials and detailed information on the Lexus brand. The resulting script was then filmed by Oscar-winning director Kevin McDonald.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes documentary explaining just how the whole thing worked:

In speaking with Marketing Week, Lexus Europe brand manager Michael Tripp envisions a future where AI plays an essential role in marketing:

“Our ambition under this umbrella is not to replace the human element but to augment it. Philosophically, could this cut out or change the creative aspect of this process? Yes. But our strategy at Lexus is we believe in man plus machine.

“I could never ask you to go look at 15 years of award-winning films and give me that data, but I can now get that and use it to inform our creative.”

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Comments
meth.ix
That is just unbelievably awesome.
zeusus
There is certainly something magical about the way Lexus goes about their marketing concepts and allows funding to make them into reality.

Wish they'd do that more with the cars and tech, much like what they did with the LC. Hopefully more to come.
Ian Schmidt
That would be an award-winning commercial no matter who wrote it. Terrific work by the man who played the inspector, too - you could totally pick up his apprehension even though he wasn't broadcasting it.
maiaramdan
Amazing Ad.
S
An artificial intelligence wrote a commercial about a machine who ultimately "bring itself to life" only to prevent its destruction, not driven by intuition but instead by self preservation instinct.

This is quite disturbing.
LDeleuran
I am a bit dumbfounded by why they have chosen to use a screenshot of CSS (a language used to style webpages) for the video. This will immediately scream "we don't know what we are talking about" to anyone even slightly tech minded person that reads "A.I" in the title. When you watch the video it makes sense why CSS is included (being a central part of the pages that the A.I. supposedly is fed), but I bet a lot of potential viewers have dismissed it simply because of this choice.
krew
LDeleuran
I am a bit dumbfounded by why they have chosen to use a screenshot of CSS (a language used to style webpages) for the video. This will immediately scream "we don't know what we are talking about" to anyone even slightly tech minded person that reads "A.I" in the title. When you watch the video it makes sense why CSS is included (being a central part of the pages that the A.I. supposedly is fed), but I bet a lot of potential viewers have dismissed it simply because of this choice.
Agree, made no sense to me. And to feature it on the screenshot! :scream:
Ian Schmidt
LDeleuran
I am a bit dumbfounded by why they have chosen to use a screenshot of CSS (a language used to style webpages) for the video.
Been there, done that. It's called "Do YOU want to explain to upper management that showing actual source code from your company's most prized IP in a promo video isn't actually going to enable all your competitors to copy and one-up what you do? No, you f***ing don't." This is why the bangin' Ludacris intro video to Madden NFL 2000 features source code for the Windows program used to lay out the UI elements, rather than a single character from the actual game code.
krew
Ian Schmidt
Been there, done that. It's called "Do YOU want to explain to upper management that showing actual source code from your company's most prized IP in a promo video isn't actually going to enable all your competitors to copy and one-up what you do? No, you f***ing don't." This is why the bangin' Ludacris intro video to Madden NFL 2000 features source code for the Windows program used to lay out the UI elements, rather than a single character from the actual game code.
Brilliant, makes total sense now. Your post should be the disclaimer at the bottom of the screen.

K