Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/27/private-equity-asset-formerly-known-as-toys-r-us-releases-creepy-ai-generated-origin-video.html
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Why hire a chilld actor to pretend to sleep when you can have AI generate images of a boy spinning his head like he’s a Borg just booting up?
The whole marketing circle jerk that is driving a lot of this AI drivel is an elaborate way to burn piles of money while annoying me at the same time. Well played, I guess?
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I like it. I am sure they intend on doing something with the name, otherwise why bother with the ad at all.
It’s not terrible. It’s just bland and forgettable. My understanding is that even though they used Sora to produce the video, there was a lot of post-processing work done. This is wild because you’d think that if there were a human hand in this, they’d try to make it more interesting.
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It’s fucking terrible, devoid of a soul, and unsettling. Not at all the wondrous feeling a toy store should give you.
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… am I supposed to be excited now, or am I just supposed to be imagining being excited 
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This is the crux of it. If you’re going to spend all that money on post-production anyway…just fucking hire a human director with a vision they can achieve on the budget that’s available.
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Feed that as a prompt to one of the AIs and they’ll tell you (at great length!) how you should feel about it 
At 10am, they open!
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Aren’t these just scenes from Polar Express?
No disagreement from me.
…has slowly started to pop [up] as a store-within-a-store toy section that exists within other big brand stores.
Which is all to say: Toys ‘R’ Us is a toy store that only exists on paper.
So, effectively, they are now a toy distributer rather than a retailer, perhaps?
In the case of the ‘Toys’ ad, the AI characters (to be trademarked??) could possibly be used in other ways later on, plus they never age, die, get paid, or sue you for any reason. Plus, the AI creations get around having to deal with agents and holding auditions and anything else attendant when dealing with flesh and blood characters. That said, the TrU characters’ obvious fakery only more deeply stamps “LOSER” on TrU’ s forehead.
Not getting sued by abused child actors would have been a perk for Nickelodeon. But overall I don’t think they paid out much, and mostly dumped the responsibility onto the producer doing the majority of the abuse.
But never aging seems like a solved problem for Disney who can run the same child actors for 10 years then show reruns for another 20. Then replace a popular series with a new similar looking child actor.
Or animate characters for a century and swamp anyone with lawsuits if they try to make the most obvious parody of it. And CGI designs are going to be with us for a very long time. AI isn’t necessary to get Buzz Lightyear to say anything you want.
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