How a fake AI-generated KFC ad provoked creatives and fueled an industry debate

A film director’s attempt to use generative AI to create a fake KFC ad has sparked a firestorm on social media, drawing strong reactions from the creative community, accusations of plagiarism and renewed debate over AI’s role in ad production. The director, David Blagojevic, posted his AI-generated project to social media last week. It depicted a roughly 45-second commercial with dozens of photorealistic shots, including believable scenes of people eating fried chicken and accurate representations of KFC branding. Blagojevic, the co-founder of Serbia-based film company Davinci Productions, has developed a following on social media for this kind of experimentation and has previously posted unaffiliated mock ads for Dior and Chanel. While the video garnered initial praise for its use of AI, especially on LinkedIn, another film director, Joris Noordenbos, had a much different reaction. Noordenbos said the fake ad contained mostly replicas of real shots he had filmed a few years prior, for real ads, for the real KFC brand. “It felt like seeing an AI Xerox machine,” Noordenbos told Ad Age. When Noordenbos posted to Instagram a side-by-side reel of virtually identical shots from the two ads, Blagojevic quickly faced backlash. Blagojevic’s post, which initially did not give credit to Noordenbos or any other director, was soon filled with critical comments, while many others piled on in Noordenbos’s comment section. Within two days, Noordenbos’ side-by-side reel had garnered more than 30,000 likes—well above the support shown for Blagojevic’s post. On Friday evening, Blagojevic uploaded a new video providing behind-the-scenes commentary on how he developed the ad, in which he explicitly credited Noordenbos and other directors whose content he’d used. Blagojevic also updated his original post to include tags for Noordenbos’ and the other creatives’ Instagram accounts. “The intention was never do diminish or discredit anyone’s hard work,” Blagojevic told Ad Age. “It was a test to see how close can AI get to the existing KFC TV spots. That’s all.” Debate over AI in advertising intensifies The episode marks the latest tension between purveyors of AI technology and skeptical creative marketers, following controversies surrounding an Under Armour ad and Adobe’s embrace of AI. Many creatives have sought to slow the infiltration of AI tools in production-related tasks, fearing that such automation erodes creativity and may eventually lead to their replacement. Meanwhile, those pushing the technology have cited advantages in production efficiencies as a reason for its necessary adoption, as well as its growing ability to generate creative material. This latest instance also illustrates how brands are caught in the middle of the debate. AI technology is trained on virtually all data online, including brands’ intellectual property. AI providers doubled down on this practice last month, submitting policy proposals to the federal government asking for unfettered access to published copyrighted content. As AI experimenters such as Blagojevic develop new case studies highlighting the technology’s applications for marketing, branded content is being used, warped and disseminated without explicit permission. Indeed, Blagojevic and his team “analyzed” real brand campaigns for KFC to create the mock ad, including breaking down shots of food to understand their tone, lighting, styling and emotional feel, the director acknowledged in response to a comment on his original Instagram post. Blagojevic went on to explain this process in more detail in the behind-the-scenes video he uploaded on Friday. KFC did not respond to a request for comment. “Using a brand’s likeness and campaign material without permission is obviously an issue,” said Greg Swan, senior partner at marketing agency Finn Partners. “Even with a disclaimer, recreating a real ad this closely blurs the lines around brand [intellectual property] and art.” Noordenbos initially created the similar shots in 2022 and 2023 for campaigns for KFC’s South African and Eastern European markets. Last week, a representative from KFC who had worked with Noordenbos reached out to provide support, Noordenbos said. KFC has not made any public statement about the matter. Also read: How Puma used AI agents to create an ad from scratch Credit is a growing issue in AI-driven advertising Insufficient attribution of credit, which is central to the ongoing debate between AI and creativity, was the primary point of friction in Blagojevic’s experiment, Noordenbos said. In a disclaimer made at the end of the caption for his original post, Blagojevic acknowledged that the purpose of the project “was to test how closely we can replicate the visual and stylistic qualities of traditional KFC campaigns using current AI technologies.” The same disclaimer was provided in the final scene of the mock KFC ad. But Noordenbos said the acknowledgments felt buried, and were made even less relevant by the fact that Blagojevic appeared to take the bulk of the credit for the creative underlying the ad. In the caption for his original post, Blagojevic wrote, “It all started analog—pen and paper sketches for the storyboard,” a statement that gave the impression Blagojevic had created the spot from scratch, Noordenbos said. Soon after the backlash started, Blagojevic admitted to using Noordenbos’ shots in an Instagram Story, Noordenbos said. But that credit ultimately disappeared along with the Story, which is designed to erase itself after 24 hours. Blagojevic did not update his original post, or give any lasting credit to Noordenbos or any other director, until he uploaded the new video on Friday evening. If Blagojevic had named Noordenbos and anyone else whose work was analyzed for the mock ad from the start, or updated the initial post to include the credit after first receiving backlash, that would have resolved the issue, Noordenbos said. In a field where people earn opportunities in large part because of who sees their work, giving that credit in a public and enduring way is important, Noordenbos said. “The lack of credit in an era of tagging and ‘inspo’ culture [that is] pretty concerned about AI coming into our industry clearly hits a nerve,” said Finn Partners’ Swan. “AI doesn’t remove creative responsibility. It makes transparency even more important.” Despite the episode, Noordenbos was optimistic that AI can be used to help creatives, especially for highly technical processes, such as filming in slow motion. He has tried out the tools himself, including ChatGPT, to polish his writing and several image generator platforms. “We need to use AI to push advertising boundaries, instead of remixing what’s already out there,” Noordenbos said.

How a fake AI-generated KFC ad provoked creatives and fueled an industry debate

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