"Like family, but with more cheese."

Pepperoni Hug Spot

A mind-bending, AI-generated pizza restaurant commercial is seriously messing with our brains.

The 30-second clip, which went viral on the subreddit r/oddlyterrifying this week, advertises a made-up franchise called "Pepperoni Hug Spot" where all your cheesy pepperoni dreams come true.

"Are you ready for best pizza of life?" says a lifeless, AI-generated voiceover. "Bring friends down to Pepperoni Hug Spot."

"Like family, but with more cheese," reads the AI restaurant's slogan.

AI Horror Show

To put it bluntly, it's the stuff of nightmares. Especially when it comes to closeup shots of customers eating slices of pizza, the AI clearly struggles to render believable mouths and faces, turning the act of biting into a cheesy slice into a multi-dimensional horror show.

"This feels like the shit I see in my dreams while I’m trying to fall asleep," one redditor wrote. "Just a collection of gibberish and weird sequences."

According to the video's maker, who goes by the moniker Pizza Later, the clip was made using an AI video generator called Runway Gen-2. The tool was made available to the public last week and allows users to turn simple text prompts into entire video clips.

Pizza Later fed images generated with Midjourney into Runway and assembled the whole thing in Adobe After Effects.

"Definitely wasted three hours of my life making this today," Pizza Later admitted on Twitter.

While impressive, Runway and other tools like it still have a long way to go until they can generate photorealistic footage. Earlier this month, for instance, we came across a horrifying AI-generated clip of famed actor Will Smith indulging in a bowl of spaghetti, courtesy of a competing AI model called ModelScope Text2video.

Until AI tools learn to generate more believable-looking footage, we'll have to live with ads like Pepperoni Hug Spot haunting our dreams.

More on AI videos: Horrific AI-Generated Video Shows Will Smith Eating Spaghetti


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