Facepalm: Companies that are excited about generative AI speeding up productivity – usually at the cost of human employees – often don't care about the public's opinion. But McDonald's just found out what happens when you ignore the general consensus. Its new AI-made Christmas ad has been pulled after being universally panned.
McDonald's Netherlands unwisely decided that an AI-generated ad would be a good idea to promote its Christmas campaign. It's pretty easy to spot the tell-tale signs that something was created by an AI, especially when it includes "real" people, as this 45-second ad does.
The ad itself revolves around the concept that Christmas is the "most terrible time of the year," ironically. It contains the usual awfulness you'd expect to see in these sorts of things: background characters with distorted faces, bizarre physics, and bodies that blend and twist into themselves. It's all quite Lovecraftian, frankly.
McDonald's has released an AI-generated Christmas ad
– Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave) December 8, 2025
The studio behind it says they 'hardly slept' for several weeks while writing AI prompts and refining the shots – 'AI didn't make this film. We did'
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The Gardening.club, the AI division of The Sweetshop, which made the ad, defended it on LinkedIn. The team acknowledged that AI film divides opinion and that the ad is 100% AI-generated, but it also claims that the number of hours poured into the production was more than what would be required for a traditional ad.
"Just like a traditional shoot, the film needed a director, real storytelling instincts, and intentional casting, we selected and shaped each AI performer, their look, energy, and emotional presence, to meet the brief just as we would in live action film. It required virtual location scouting, solid references, screen tests, and a countless amount of takes to maintain true cinematic continuity," the post reads.
The Sweetshop's CEO, Melanie Bridge, said on Instagram that it took ten people five weeks of full-time work to create the ad.
Despite highlighting the amount of work that went into the clip, the overwhelming majority of people hate it. There's also been plenty of mockery over the claims that making the ad was so difficult. "If you're using A.I. to create something, then you didn't make anything," wrote one X user.
McDonalds Netherlands has now delisted the AI ad on YouTube, but plenty of social media users have re-posted it.
Even though we're used to this sort of response, companies keep pushing out AI content like this. Coca-Cola was slammed for its AI-generated holiday ad in 2024, but it still released two more AI-made ads for Christmas 2025.
As users raged against more AI slop, Pratik Thakar, head of generative AI at Coca-Cola, gave this less-than-diplomatic response: "The genie is out of the bottle," Thakar told The Hollywood Reporter, "and you're not going to put it back in."