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I am not a football person — not even a little bit. However, that does not stop me from tuning into the Super Bowl for two reasons: the halftime show, which is always the best part, and the ads.
I am not a huge fan of being advertised to, but marketing departments have always gone all out for these wildly expensive ads — up until this year.
This year, the ads were awful. Atrocious. I stopped watching the Super Bowl because of them, and there were two in particular that made me turn the TV off: the SVEDKA ad and the Make America Healthy Again ad.
The SVEDKA ad was the first one I saw. To say it creeped me out would be an understatement. The ad shows two robots, one masculine and one feminine, dancing while shaking bottles of SVEDKA Vodka. Both of them are incredibly creepy.
It’s obvious from the start that this ad is AI-generated. Ignoring the unsettling visuals, the number of advertisements that used or promoted AI was incredibly concerning.
AI is cheap. You do not have to pay artists, actors or writers, so using it in your advertisements is a surefire way to save a buck. However, an advertisement is the first impression people get of your company. I cannot help but think that if you cheap out on your marketing, you must be cutting corners elsewhere.
The Super Bowl ads proved that AI is being promoted as something inevitable, something we all just have to roll over and accept. Even though the United Nations declared we’ve reached a global water bankruptcy two and a half weeks before Super Bowl Sunday, AI-related ads like Meta, Amazon and Ramp still aired. AI and data centers — which power AI models using up to 5,000,000 gallons of water a day — massively contribute to this water bankruptcy.
Artificial intelligence is not the saving grace it’s being advertised as. Your brain is a muscle, and as we were told in our early-education years, you need to use it to keep it functioning. When AI writes an email for you, that muscle atrophies. No matter what ads say, you do not need AI.
The Mike Tyson Super Bowl ad was one of the most fatphobic pieces of propaganda I’ve ever seen. It features Mike Tyson delivering an almost emotional monologue about how gross fat people are while aggressively eating produce.
From just a visual standpoint, I think this ad is quite funny. I saw Tyson eating an apple with vigor and immediately thought of his fight in 1997, where he bit off a piece of his opponent’s ear, though I doubt this was the intended reaction from viewers.
“My sister’s name was Denise — she died of obesity,” Tyson claimed in the ad. No, she did not. No fat person just dies of being fat. I will not keel over dead tomorrow because there is fat on my body. Tyson immediately followed that statement, saying, “She had a heart attack.” There we go. “Fat” was not listed as her official cause of death.
It’s insane to use the death of a person to promote fatphobic ideologies. It is gross.
Tyson also said in the ad, “I was so fat and nasty. … I wanted to kill myself.” Suicidal ideation is not a side effect of being fat; it is a side effect of internalized antifat bias and living in a fatphobic society. The fat inside of your body does not have a biological connection to suicidal ideation — the world that creates ads like these does.
Of course, we cannot ignore the small font at the bottom of the screen: “Paid for by MAHA Center Inc.” Make America Healthy Again, a movement that’s made some wild claims and decisions regarding food in the past year or so, is led by RFK Jr., who has gone on a tear regarding food safety standards. I don’t really care or trust his opinion on “healthy” foods. The man has no qualifications. I care much less to hear his opinion on fat people’s bodies.
I was immensely disappointed by this year’s Super Bowl ads. I enjoy seeing the creativity that rests within massive corporations because sometimes they strike gold. This year, from AI advertisements to fatphobic remarks, the only thing they unearthed was dirt.
Reach Audrey Weishaar at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
