Coca-Cola has done it again. For the second consecutive year, the beverage giant has unleashed Christmas adverts created through AI on unsuspecting audiences, and the internet is not pleased.
The company’s 2025 holiday campaign includes two new AI-created commercials featuring anthropomorphic animals staring lovingly at the iconic red Coca-Cola trucks. Because the technology has improved since last year, the truck wheels actually turn this time, social media users are responding with the same anger and disappointment that greeted the 2024 ads.
The reaction has been swift and fierce. Calls for boycotts flooded social media platforms, with some consumers declaring they’d switch to Pepsi rather than support a company that relies on AI for its advertising. The vitriol isn’t just about the quality of the ads themselves, though many found them visually unsettling. It’s about what they represent.
Adding fuel to the fire was a quote from Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s head of generative AI, who told The Hollywood Reporter: “The genie is out of the bottle, and you’re not going to put it back in.”
The dismissive arrogance of the comment, implying some inevitability to AI’s adoption, was deeply troubling to workers in all industries. It is no longer just a question of advertisements; it is a question of the future of human labor.
How AI Ads of Coca-Cola Undermine a Handcrafted Holiday Tradition?
The backlash against Coca-Cola’s AI ads reflects broader anxieties over the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs. Creative professionals already find themselves in competition with AI-generated content churned out at ever-increasing levels and low cost.
Meanwhile, retail workers are suffering the effects of mass layoffs blamed on AI automation.
If AI technology could deliver even a portion of what was promised by zealous advocates, whole industries might be radically downsizing their workforce. The fact that even Coca-Cola embraced AI to create its most iconic ad makes no creative field really safe anymore.
This year, Coca-Cola wouldn’t comment to The Wall Street Journal on how much its new holiday campaign cost to produce. The silence gave rise to the belief that this latest production involving AI wasn’t as straightforward nor as inexpensive as simply keying in a few prompts into a computer, suggesting the new tech may not offer the cost savings firms are expecting.
What makes Coca-Cola’s AI gambit particularly controversial, of course, is the company’s unique place in Christmas tradition. Coca-Cola is credited with popularizing the modern image of Santa Claus in his red-and-white suit; the brand’s holiday advertising has become an American institution, even immortalized in the finale of the acclaimed series Mad Men.
And these new AI ads aren’t even original concepts; they represent a remake of the seminal 1995 hand-crafted commercial “Holidays Are Coming” that became a cultural touchstone. Watching a multi-billion-dollar corporation replace handcrafted artistry with AI-generated content feels, to many viewers, like a betrayal of everything those nostalgic ads represented.
Why Coca-Cola’s AI Ads Spark the Fight for Creative Authenticity?
Filmmaker Adam Curtis gave a haunting view of this new generative AI as “the ghost of our time.” He says that the machines absorb imagery, music, and writing created by previous generations, “and mash them up into this complex thing which then feeds itself back to us.”
His conclusion is particularly relevant to the situation of Coca-Cola: “AI is not the future. It’s the final end of the past.”
This observation captures exactly why the AI ads feel so wrong to viewers. All AI-generated media is inherently derivative, in that it is trained on thousands of works by artists and creators, often without permission. When Coca-Cola uses AI to emulate its classic ads, it’s producing not a creation anew, but an empty echo.
While other companies, like Google, have also released AI-generated ads, no other company has faced the same intensity of backlash.
Coca-Cola became ground zero in the fight against generative AI-not just because of what the company is doing but because of what it represents: a beloved brand trading genuine creativity and human artistry for technological convenience.
This raises fundamental questions about the use of AI in creative industries and whether efficiency can or should trump authenticity. With generative AI getting better at passing what some have called the “Will Smith Eating Spaghetti Test” for realistic video, the remaining uncanny valley effect indicates that we are not yet ready to adopt machine-generated content as a replacement for human ingenuity.
As for Coca-Cola, that’s a pretty clear message from their consumers: when it comes to Christmas magic, they want the real thing, not some AI-generated imitation.
