Can an AI have an opinion about Super Bowl commercials?

We asked OpenAI's InstructGPT to review this year's crop of ads.

Artificial Intelligence has made incredible progress in marketing in recent years, particularly where it applies to the delivery and measurement of media. But is AI capable of understanding creative ideas? We're fascinated by these sorts of questions at Addition, so we decided to explore it further by tasking an AI to generate unfiltered reviews of this year's Super Bowl commercials.

To pull this off, we collected tens of thousands of Tweets about ads during the game, fed them to OpenAI's latest model, InstructGPT, and provided it with prompts and questions to answer about this year's crop of ads. 

Here's what it had to say: 

What were some of the best Super Bowl Commercials this year?

AI: There were many great Super Bowl commercials this year. Some of the best include the E-Trade baby, the Larry David for Crypto ad, the Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd for Lay's ad, and the GM Dr. Evil ad.

Why did people like the Larry David Crypto ad?

AI: People found the Larry David Crypto ad funny, and some found it memorable. It also resonated with people, as it took on the critic, the skeptic, and the pessimist.

What did people like about the E-Trade baby Super Bowl Commercial? 

AI: People loved seeing the bromance between Paul Rudd and Seth Rogan. They also found the ad funny and entertaining.

What were some of the things people liked about the GM Dr. Evil ad?

AI: People who liked the GM Dr. Evil ad generally found it funny. Some found the comeback of Dr. Evil to be clever, and others simply enjoyed the nostalgia of seeing Mike Myers reprise his role from the Austin Powers movies.

What were this year's worst Super Bowl commercials?

AI: This year's crop of Super Bowl commercials was met with mixed reactions, but many people seemed to agree that they were lackluster at best. Some of the worst offenders were for products like Irish Spring soap, car dealerships, and crypto scams.

What was this year's best Super Bowl commercial, and why?

This year's best Super Bowl commercial was the GM commercial with Mike Myers as Dr. Evil. It was my favorite for a few reasons. First of all, I'm a big fan of Mike Myers and I love Austin Powers. So anytime he's in a commercial, I'm usually amused. But beyond that, I thought the ad was really well done. It was funny, clever, and it managed to actually make me want to buy a GM car.

It's necessary to take this analysis with a grain of salt. The outputs were derived using OpenAI's 'answers endpoint,' which uses qualitative techniques to find 'good enough' answers to questions. So while they come off as intelligible, they are not based on rigorous statistical analysis of every Tweet. So while they come off as insightful, they are not based on a rigorous statistical analysis of every Tweet.

But that capability – a comprehensive analysis of social content that a user can explore via natural language inputs and outputs – is within the realm of possibilities. We are working on techniques that combine the text-in-text-out format of Large Language Models with more classical AI techniques like Classification, Extraction, and Clustering. We are also exploring the possibility of re-training open-source Large Language models like GPT-J on a social text-corpus. We believe AI will soon prove capable of providing a comprehensive analysis of online conversations using natural language through these efforts.

More to come on all of this soon.

In the meantime, don't hesitate to reply to this email with any questions or feedback!