- A new ad campaign from Coca-Cola appears to mistakenly attribute a non-existent J.G. Ballard work to the author. The section of text used in the ad is actually from a book of various interviews the author gave, published years after his death. This apparent error follows previous backlash over Coca-Cola’s AI-generated Christmas ads.
Coca-Cola’s recent AI-powered advert appears to have got its facts mixed up. In an April campaign called “Classic,” the company aimed to highlight examples where its brand name appears in classic literature. The ad uses Stephen King’s The Shining and V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas as examples. However, it also includes a book called Extreme Metaphors by J. G. Ballard, which does not exist.
What the advertisement appears to reference is a book called Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008, which is a book of interviews with J.G. Ballard that was published in 2012, three years after the author’s death, and edited by Dan O’Hara and Simon Sellars.
The ads show someone typing out passages from novels on a typewriter, but where Coca-Cola is mentioned, the company has replaced the typewriter font with its iconic red logo. In promotion images of the ad shared with media outlets, the company also shared mocked-up images of book pages that seem to show J. G. Ballard as the author of Extreme Metaphors.
“The sequence of words being typed out by the imagined J. G. Ballard in the ad was never written by him, only spoken, and the only person ever to type that exact sequence out in English is me,” O’Hara, the book’s editor, told 404Media‘s Emanuel Maiberg, who first reported the error.
“What most outraged my eye was the word ‘Shangai’ being typed. Ballard would never have misspelled the name of the city in which he was born. Seeing the ad triggered an academic neurosis: Had I? I checked my copy of Extreme Metaphors and, thank god, no: It’s printed as Shanghai in the original text,” he added.
AI used in the ‘research phase’
VML, a marketing agency that worked with Coca-Cola to create the campaign, told 404Media that AI was used “in the initial research phase to identify books with brand mentions,” but the company manually fact-checked and reached out to get permission from the various authors, publishers, and estates.
O’Hara said he was concerned the ad would mislead viewers to believe his translation of Ballard’s words could were actually the author’s real-life prose.
“If you read the text in the ad, you’re not reading his prose: You’re reading mine, translating his recorded words from French,” O’Hara told 404. “I’ve done my best to render his meaning, but that’s all I’ve managed to do. My prose is a pretty poor substitute for the real thing, and I feel anyone seeing the ad and thinking there’s nothing special about the writing is both right, and misled to think it’s Ballard’s own writing.”
Representatives for Coca-Cola and VML didn’t respond to a request for comment from Fortune by press time.
Coca-Cola’s AI backlash
This isn’t the first time Coca-Cola has run into issues when using generative AI in its ads.
Late last year, the company released a series of AI-generated Christmas ads that was met with criticism online. Some artists, filmmakers, and viewers blasted the ads as eerie, low-quality, and a cost-cutting move to replace creative labor.
Many artists and creatives have protested the use of AI in the creative industries, arguing that it risks supplanting human talent and that AI models are trained on creators’ work without offering proper credit or compensation in return.
One of the ads, intended to pay homage to Coca-Cola’s classic 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” campaign, and features AI-generated people and trucks, was slammed by social media users as “soulless” and “devoid of any actual creativity.”
