Province pauses AI commercial from N.B. Liquor after negative reception
CBC
A stream of people showing up to a brightly lit front porch, each holding up a bottle of wine, spirits, or beer.
This cozy winter scene depicted in a new advertisement for N.B. Liquor encourages customers to stock up for the holidays.
But none of the smiling people, or the bottles of alcohol they are holding, are real.
The ad was made with artificial intelligence. And now N.B. Liquor is catching enough heat for the video campaign that a government minister directed them to take the ad down.
A spokesperson for N.B. Liquor said in an emailed statement that the use of AI came down to trying to manage costs.
“AI didn’t replace our team or our creative direction – our concept, story and standards still guided the entire process,” Florence Gouton wrote.
“It helped us experiment with a different technique, much like we do with animation or other creative approaches.”
Luke Randall, the minister responsible for N.B. Liquor, told reporters that he asked the Crown corporation to pause the ad once he was made aware of it.
While he said the government is hesitant to “meddle” with N.B. Liquor, “I was hearing from New Brunswickers that this was a concern.”
Randall described AI use as an “ongoing national issue” and said he asked N.B. Liquor to have a conversation about their use of AI.
“It is always the intent of this government … to be supporting local,” Randall said, but he would not say, when pressed by reporters, if he asked N.B. Liquor not to use AI in commercials anymore.
The ad was not received well by Pierre-Luc Arseneau, a freelance filmmaker and graphic artist from New Brunswick, who worked on a Christmas commercial for N.B. Liquor last year.
“It's something to lose a contract to somebody that's creating better stuff than you are. But it's something else to lose a contract to generative AI,” Arseneau said in an interview with CBC Radio’s Shift.
Arseneau said it’s immediately obvious that the ad is made with AI.
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