The days of expensive commercial budgets, large teams of creatives and actors putting together scenes, and time-consuming delays over visual effects will soon be over. Maybe.
At a time when chatbots are sounding more human than ever and art generators can create images that look like photos, a YouTuber named Pizza Later proved that with a bit of creativity and know-how of various AI tools, you can make a commercial in under three hours that might get noticed by Twitter CEO Elon Musk and the official Pizza Hut account.
Pizza Later, who withheld his name to keep his online anonymity, told Insider that he works in motion graphics during the day. For almost a year, he’s been tinkering with applications like Midjourney and Runway AI — a video generator — which is how he got the idea to create a commercial for a fictional pizza joint called Pepperoni Hug Spot.
Inspired by a “terrifying” AI clip of Will Smith eating spaghetti created on Runway, Pizza Later began putting together clips of people eating food to send to friends.
“And then from there, I just kind of sourced out the rest of the clips, just kind of imagining what else would be in a television commercial for a pizza place,” he said.
He told Insider the entire process took three hours on Monday during a slow day at work. All the assets in the commercial were made with AI, from the resonant, professional-sounding voice-over to the bizarre clips insider the Pepperoni Hug Spot pizzeria.
“I’m old enough to remember a time before YouTube, and stuff used to be so time-consuming. And before my current job, I was actually in video production. I know how long it takes to set up lights and microphones and all that entails. So even though this stuff is really rough right now, it blows my mind.”
Here’s how you can make your own AI commercial.
Start off with a script
The foundation of every good commercial is a script to guide the production. Pizza Later said he used GPT-4, the newest version of GPT, to create the dialogue for the voice-over. Since ChatGPT launched in December, there has been a rise in content creators using the application to make their jobs easier.
“I’m not much of a writer, so it would probably take me much longer to come up with a script,” he said. “Even as simple as the few lines that are in there.”
The sentences in the Pepperoni Hug Spot commercial are noticeably grammatically incorrect and don’t sound like something GPT would produce. Pizza Later said that he intentionally asked the program to write this way to add to the eerieness and humor of the commercial.
He also said the name “Pepperoni Hug Spot” was something he brainstormed with GPT.
“It doesn’t mean anything obviously. But it sounds funny. So that was when I went with.”
Put together a voice-over
AI voiceover technology has become a pest in the music industry, as users online are releasing music pretending to be Drake, The Weeknd, and Travis Scott, as well as a meme online (like Joe Biden and Donald Trump yelling at each other through gaming headsets while playing Overwatch).
It’s also helpful for creating a commercial without hiring a voice actor. Pizza Later told Insider that he used Eleven Labs to create the voiceover by plugging in the script created in GPT-4.