Oh, the humanity! A $2,000 commercial. Someone fetch the smelling salts and a vintage 1994 copy of *AdAge*, because the creative class is having a full-blown existential crisis over the efficiency of a GPU. The Verge is sounding the alarm on the “AI ad-pocalypse,” mourning the loss of the “joy” of advertising—an industry famously known for its integrity, soul, and definitely not for tricking you into buying sugar water by pretending it’ll make you popular.

Let’s dismantle the premise that we are losing a golden age of “mini-movies.” The article laments that AI is sucking the joy out of commercials, operating on the bold assumption that the average person enjoys being interrupted by a 30-second cinematic masterpiece for laundry detergent while trying to watch a ten-minute video on how to fix a leaky sink. Newsflash: The “joy” of advertising was a one-way street paved with million-dollar production budgets that consumers have been trying to bypass with AdBlock and “Skip” buttons since the dawn of the digital age.

The primary “crime” cited here is that a Kalshi ad only cost $2,000 to produce. In the world of traditional marketing, where “creativity” is often code for “we spent $50,000 on a craft services table in the desert,” efficiency is apparently a sin. The assumption is that a “substantial production budget” somehow translates to a better experience for the viewer. But let’s be real: a bad idea remains a bad idea whether it costs $2 million or $2. If AI can generate a mediocre commercial for the price of a used 2012 Honda Civic instead of the GDP of a small island nation, that’s not an apocalypse; it’s an audit.

The author argues that ads are “mini-movies” and “illustrations” that require “a great deal of creativity.” This is a touching, if slightly delusional, sentiment. For every “1984” Apple commercial, there are ten thousand ads of a generic family smiling at a box of crackers while a ukulele plays aggressively in the background. Most advertising isn’t “art”; it’s visual white noise designed to manipulate your dopamine receptors. If AI can automate the production of the 99% of commercials that are already soul-crushing, it’s not “killing” creativity—it’s just firing the middleman who was holding the paintbrush.

Then there’s the “joy” factor. If you truly believe that AI is “sucking the joy” out of the advertising industry, you’re likely confusing “joy” with “job security for people who charge $500 an hour to pick a font.” The consumer isn’t losing joy; they’re losing the pretense. We’re moving from human-made corporate propaganda to machine-made corporate propaganda. The only difference is that the machine doesn’t demand a trailer with a specific brand of sparkling water.

The “AI ad-pocalypse” isn’t a threat to the quality of what we see on screen; it’s a threat to the bloated, inefficient legacy systems of Madison Avenue. We’re being told to fear a world of cheap, weird, AI-generated content, as if the current landscape of “Short-form video” isn’t already a dumpster fire of low-effort trends and recycled audio. If the “joy” of your industry relies on clients being forced to overpay for something a neural network can now do in ten minutes, perhaps it wasn’t the AI that was the problem—it was the business model.

Welcome to the future of marketing: it’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s probably going to be just as annoying as the “human-centric” ads we’ve been muting for decades. Only now, the company making the ad might actually have enough money left over to, I don’t know, lower the price of the product? Just kidding. They’ll keep the profit. That’s the one part of the “ad-pocalypse” that will stay perfectly, humanly traditional.