Here’s the $2,000 fully AI-generated ad that aired during the NBA Finals
If you’ve been on social media lately, you might’ve seen the unsettling AI slop videos showing AI-generated people in wild scenarios or just speaking a bunch of nonsense. On Wednesday night, the betting platform Kalshi decided to take this trend outside the social sphere by putting a nonsensical AI-generated ad in front of the millions of viewers watching the NBA Finals — and it apparently cost just $2,000 to make.
The AI-generated highlights various things “people” are betting on, like whether the Oklahoma City Thunder or Indiana Pacers will win the NBA Finals, how many hurricanes will occur this year, and whether the price of eggs will go up this month. It flashes between scenes of an elderly man wearing a cowboy hat while carrying a chihuahua, someone swimming in a pool of eggs, and an alien chugging beer.
In a post on X, PJ Accetturo, who identifies himself as an “AI Filmmaker,” says Kalshi hired him to create the ad using Google’s text-to-video generator Veo 3. (My colleague Allison Johnson recently called Veo 3 “a slop monger’s dream.”)
“This took about 300–400 generations to get 15 usable clips,” Acetturo writes. “One person, 2-3 days. That’s a 95% cost reduction vs traditional ads.”
Accetturo outlines his process for creating the ad, which he says involved writing a script and then asking Gemini to generate a shot list with prompts for Veo 3. “I always tell it to return 5 prompts at a time—any more than that and the quality starts to slip,” Accetturo writes. After generating the prompts, Accetturo says he pastes them into Veo 3 and puts together the ads using a video editing app like CapCut or Adobe Premiere Pro.
It’s only been weeks since the launch of Veo 3, and if we’re already seeing AI-generated ads on TV, there’s likely much more to come. There are already plenty of videos floating around social media that are hard to peg as AI, too, not to mention the AI tools companies like Amazon, Meta, and even Netflix want to give advertisers.