AI attempts a Super Bowl touchdown
Ari Kuschnir, Founder of m ss ng p eces, is no stranger to interesting artificial intelligence films and has now attempted to take on the US advertising's golden moment by using AI to create a Super Bowl-type spot. Here, he explains how, and why...
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Credits
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- Production Company m ss ng p eces
- Director Ari Kuschnir
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Credits
powered by
- Production Company m ss ng p eces
- Director Ari Kuschnir
Credits
powered by
- Production Company m ss ng p eces
- Director Ari Kuschnir
I love making AI experiments and have struck viral gold a few times including Trump and Biden as BFFs, and showing different leaders taking ayahuasca. I’m always looking at the culture and trying to find ways to reflect it back in a surprising way.
I got access to Veo 2, Google’s new AI video generator a few weeks back but couldn’t do much with it as I’ve been deeply affected by the Palisades fire (my house is still standing, but everything else, including my daughters school, is gone).
Veo 2 is so advanced I wondered if I could make a Super Bowl-type spot with it since the visuals are so realistic and I had seen what a few friends had done with it. Maybe something funny and surreal, but the issue is it doesn’t do audio, and you can’t input an image (yet) for character consistency, so it’s hard to get a coherent continuous piece out of it with dialogue.
What you get is these great moments in 10-second clips, but there's no further way to tweak or control them. Then, a week ago, ChatGPT released their latest model o3, and I got this idea to ask it to ideate and generate concepts for a Super Bowl ad based on its understanding of the different kinds of ads, and where the culture is at in 2025. I then asked it to put together a detailed shot list and copy-pasted each to Veo 2 to see what I would get.
I quickly realised that it was going to be a failed AI experiment because the best you can do is a kind of surreal version of an ad. So, using sound design and my love of editing I put together different spots in the classic categories. Ame-re-rica seems to be the clear favourite. The song came out like that from Suno.ai when I asked it to make a 30-sec, earnest country-rock song about America. Those mistakes are what makes it unique and weird/good/bad.
So, my conclusion is that AI can’t yet make a compelling original Super Bowl ad. It can emulate very well, and the visuals and physics on Veo 2 are the best yet, but ChatGPT didn’t generate an original idea that blew me away. It remains a collaborative tool for us as storytellers to co-create with, and that’s good news in the face of all this uncertainty.
