Ryan Reynolds Let AI Write His New Mint Mobile Commercial (& We're Not Sure How To Feel About It)
For years, AI was a harbinger of doom, at least in the media landscape. It was long affiliated with killer robots scourging the planet of imperfect humanity. Now, AI is here, and Ryan Reynolds is using it to write a commercial for a mobile network provider. So it seems like we still have some time before AI sends Terminators after us.
The commercial in question is for Mint Mobile, and it's very much in the vein of other Ryan Reynolds projects. The actor introduces himself and the basic premise of the ad, which is that they had ChatGPT, which is an AI system that you could feed a prompt to, and it will provide you with a written response. Don't get us wrong; the system still has a lot of work to go through. While it will often sound like it knows what it's talking about, ChatGPT can give you totally false information (via The Atlantic), so don't expect it to write your English essay any time soon.
However, writing a commercial less than a minute in length sounds like it would be in ChatGPT's wheelhouse. And while it supposedly wrote Reynolds' monologue, there might be a reason why it's not as cool as it initially seems.
Did AI take an ad writer's job?
When looking at the comments underneath the YouTube video, the response seems overwhelmingly positive. People praise both the idea and the execution itself, writing things like, "The fact [that] Ryan can use internet trends and not make it cringey is a gift" and "I'm starting to think that Ryan is a robot. The script that the AI made sounds eerily like Ryan Reynolds."
It certainly seems impressive. After all, Reynolds supposedly told the AI to write a Mint Mobile ad using a swear word, adding a joke, and promoting the company's latest deal. And it was able to do so, but you know what else could've written that commercial? The answer is an actual human being who could've used the money you pay them to buy goods and services.
We're not sure if you're aware of this, but an actual human person wrote this article you're reading. And that person needs food and shelter and Pokémon cards. And to get the money to buy those things, they need a job, preferably one that involves writing because that's all they know how to do. While there are plenty of articles out there that insist AI won't take people's jobs any time soon, it's a worrisome prospect. The Mint Mobile ad makes for a nice gimmick at the moment, but what if other companies decide to go down a less self-aware route? People could lose gigs in the process, so hopefully, AI remains a novelty and not a complete tide change.