Take this unofficial Nike advertisement that a neural network spit out after being trained on seven years worth of the company’s commercials: TNW caught up with the faux-advertisement’s creator, Jean-Baptiste Le Divelec, via email, who shared their inspiration for the project with us: Sure, the ad might sound like a jumbled, cacophonous word-soup of gibberish. But there’s a vein of inspiration pulsing within it. Seriously, “If you can’t beat him, legend that thing!” is a T-shirt worthy slogan if I’ve ever heard one. There’s something about the results of this mundane neural network’s abstraction that’s as quixotic and interesting as the human creative spirit itself – if you squint and suspend your disbelief anyway. Eat your heart out GPT-2. I wanted to experiment with it myself at first hand and try to generate a commercial. So I took one of the most iconic brand in the world, Nike, and started to look for all of the brand manifesto commercials I could find. Nike just made sense because they are definitely highly regarded in the industry, and I knew I would get enough data to get interesting results. Per Le Divelec’s website: Our hat’s off to the creator, way to Legend That Thing! The result — which I named “AI and Kennedy” — is a schizophrenic journey of motivation bordering on the unintelligible. But between these absurd lines, I observed, with a chill, a touch of genius. Maybe the claim that an AI can do it, isn’t so crazy after all.
