British production company Private Island has gone viral with a bizarre beer ad that it created using AI and the results are the stuff of bad dreams.

The ad was made in just a few days using AI technologies Runway Gen2, Stable Diffusion and ModelScope. The results are impressive and disturbing in equal measure … and it’s a fair bet drinks companies won’t be rushing to replace advertising agencies with AI any time soon.

Private Island posted the 30-second clip to its website and Instagram that has been shared around the world and racked up millions of views on Reddit, Twitter and TikTok.

Titled “Synthetic Summer” it features “All Star” by Smash Mouth as its soundtrack and features an outdoor party. As Private Island notes: “No real people are featured in this video”.

The results … well, viewers were more than a bit freaked by aspects such as the AI generated partygoers having 14 fingers and a huge fire erupting during the barbecue.

“Night terror trip inducing,” tweeted one person in response to the video.

“The story arc from backyard barbeque to apocalypse was pretty cool,” wrote another Twitter user.

Another wrote: “This is what hell looks like. At least we know now.”

“It’s like a bad acid trip,” wrote one person on TikTok, while another wrote, “I don’t want AI to improve. I want it to stay like this forever.”

One Reddit user said, “It took me a second to realise something was terribly, terribly wrong.”

Private Island co-founder Chris Boyle told Today.com: “Generally, our work is mixed media, combining live-action and animation, so using AI tools seems like a natural evolution. We’ve been investigating generative image for the last 12 months — exploring new ways of working and new mediums of visuals powered by Machine Learning.”

“We’ve spent much of the last year playing with these tools as we’re extremely interested in the aesthetic of emulating humanity — what that looks like artistically but, more importantly, what that feels like to the viewer,” Boyle says.

“Humans generally are very good at multitasking. When we perceive the world around us, we extract a load of information whether you’re playing football or eating out with friends … My instinct is that whilst, on first impression, this film looks fine, subconsciously, you flag the extra fingers and oddness that enhances the weirdness.”

Ars Technica writes: “Generative AI still has a long way to go before it can autonomously bedazzle the masses … people are still behind the wheel of these alien works, and from that, we can potentially take some semblance of comfort. Maybe.

“Still, neither video can match the purity and majesty of AI-generated Will Smith eating spaghetti, which will forever live in our hearts as our first AI-generated video meme nightmare.”

Private Island isn’t the only one experimenting in the space. Gizmodo has reported on 7 of the Weirdest AI-Generated Commercials…So Far