可口可乐公司（Coca-Cola）近期推出的人工智能广告疑似存在事实混淆问题。图片来源：Photo credit should read JUNG YEON-JE/AFP via Getty Images
• 可口可乐新推出的广告似乎误将一本虚构书籍标注为作家詹姆斯·格雷厄姆·巴拉德（J.G. Ballard）的作品。广告中引用的文本实际节选自一本收录该作家多场访谈的合集，而该书在作家去世多年后才出版。这一明显失误再次引发争议，延续了其早前人工智能生成圣诞广告的风波。
可口可乐最新的人工智能广告疑似存在事实混淆问题。在4月推出的“经典”广告活动中，该公司旨在展示品牌名称出现在经典文学中的案例。广告中提及了斯蒂芬·金（Stephen King）的《闪灵》（The Shining）和维迪亚达·苏莱普拉萨德·奈保尔（V. S. Naipaul）的《毕司沃斯先生的房子》（A House for Mr. Biswas），然而，它还提及了詹姆斯·格雷厄姆·巴拉德所著的《极端隐喻》（Extreme Metaphors）——而此书实为虚构。
广告所引内容实则出自《极端隐喻：詹姆斯·格雷厄姆·巴拉德访谈录（1967-2008）》（Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008）——这部由丹·奥哈拉（Dan O’Hara）与西蒙·塞拉斯（Simon Sellars）共同编纂的访谈合集，于2012年巴拉德逝世三年后出版。
广告画面中，有人用打字机敲出小说段落，而涉及可口可乐的部分，公司将打字机字体替换为品牌标志性的红色标识。在向媒体发布的广告宣传图中，可口可乐还展示了模拟的书页图片，似乎将《极端隐喻》的作者标注为詹姆斯·格雷厄姆·巴拉德。
“广告中臆想的詹姆斯·格雷厄姆·巴拉德敲出的这段文字从未由他本人撰写，只是他曾发表的言论，而唯一用英文原封不动敲出这段文字的人是我。”该书编纂者奥哈拉告诉率先披露此事的404Media记者伊曼纽尔·迈伯格（Emanuel Maiberg）。
他补充道：“最令我愤慨的是广告中出现了‘Shangai’一词。巴拉德绝不会拼错自己出生城市的名字。这则广告触发了我的‘学术神经官能症’：是我弄错了吗？我检查了《极端隐喻》的样书，谢天谢地，原文印的是正确的‘Shanghai’。”
“检索阶段”使用人工智能
与可口可乐合作打造该宣传活动的营销机构VML向404Media表示，人工智能被用于“初步文献检索，以识别提及品牌的书籍”，但公司对相关信息进行了人工事实核查，并联系了多位作者、出版商及版权继承人以获取许可。
奥哈拉表示，他担心这则广告会误导观众，让他们以为自己对巴拉德访谈内容的翻译是作家亲笔创作的散文作品。
奥哈拉告诉404Media ：“广告呈现的文本并非其散文原作，而是我对巴拉德法语访谈录音的编译转写。我已竭力忠实传递其思想内核，但也仅能做到这点。我的文字远不及原作，我觉得任何看过广告并认为这段文字平淡无奇的人，既符合事实判断，又被误导认为这是巴拉德亲笔创作的内容。”
截至发稿，可口可乐和VML的代表尚未回应《财富》杂志的置评请求。
可口可乐的人工智能争议
这并非可口可乐首次因在广告中使用生成式人工智能引发争议。
去年年底，该公司发布了一系列人工智能生成的圣诞广告，在网上招致批评。部分艺术家、电影制作人和观众抨击这些广告风格怪异、质量欠佳，认为其本质是通过技术替代创意劳动力的降本举措。
许多艺术家和创意从业者一直抗议创意行业使用人工智能，指出该技术可能取代创作者，且人工智能模型在训练时未经许可使用创作者的作品，既未注明来源，也未给予报酬。
其中一则旨在致敬可口可乐1995年经典广告“节日来临”（Holidays Are Coming）的人工智能广告，其画面中的人物和卡车都是由人工智能生成的，被社交媒体用户斥为“毫无灵魂”、“完全缺乏真正的创造力”。 （财富中文网）
译者：中慧言-王芳
• A new ad campaign from Coca-Cola appears to mistakenly attribute a non-existent J.G. Ballard work to the author. The section of text used in the ad is actually from a book of various interviews the author gave, published years after his death. This apparent error follows previous backlash over Coca-Cola’s AI-generated Christmas ads.
Coca-Cola’s recent AI-powered advert appears to have got its facts mixed up. In an April campaign called “Classic,” the company aimed to highlight examples where its brand name appears in classic literature. The ad uses Stephen King’s The Shining and V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas as examples. However, it also includes a book called Extreme Metaphors by J. G. Ballard, which does not exist.
What the advertisement appears to reference is a book called Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008, which is a book of interviews with J.G. Ballard that was published in 2012, three years after the author’s death, and edited by Dan O’Hara and Simon Sellars.
The ads show someone typing out passages from novels on a typewriter, but where Coca-Cola is mentioned, the company has replaced the typewriter font with its iconic red logo. In promotion images of the ad shared with media outlets, the company also shared mocked-up images of book pages that seem to show J. G. Ballard as the author of Extreme Metaphors.
“The sequence of words being typed out by the imagined J. G. Ballard in the ad was never written by him, only spoken, and the only person ever to type that exact sequence out in English is me,” O’Hara, the book’s editor, told 404Media‘s Emanuel Maiberg, who first reported the error.
“What most outraged my eye was the word ‘Shangai’ being typed. Ballard would never have misspelled the name of the city in which he was born. Seeing the ad triggered an academic neurosis: Had I? I checked my copy of Extreme Metaphors and, thank god, no: It’s printed as Shanghai in the original text,” he added.
AI used in the ‘research phase’
VML, a marketing agency that worked with Coca-Cola to create the campaign, told 404Media that AI was used “in the initial research phase to identify books with brand mentions,” but the company manually fact-checked and reached out to get permission from the various authors, publishers, and estates.
O’Hara said he was concerned the ad would mislead viewers to believe his translation of Ballard’s words could were actually the author’s real-life prose.
“If you read the text in the ad, you’re not reading his prose: You’re reading mine, translating his recorded words from French,” O’Hara told 404. “I’ve done my best to render his meaning, but that’s all I’ve managed to do. My prose is a pretty poor substitute for the real thing, and I feel anyone seeing the ad and thinking there’s nothing special about the writing is both right, and misled to think it’s Ballard’s own writing.”
Representatives for Coca-Cola and VML didn’t respond to a request for comment from Fortune by press time.
Coca-Cola’s AI backlash
This isn’t the first time Coca-Cola has run into issues when using generative AI in its ads.
Late last year, the company released a series of AI-generated Christmas ads that was met with criticism online. Some artists, filmmakers, and viewers blasted the ads as eerie, low-quality, and a cost-cutting move to replace creative labor.
Many artists and creatives have protested the use of AI in the creative industries, arguing that it risks supplanting human talent and that AI models are trained on creators’ work without offering proper credit or compensation in return.
One of the ads, intended to pay homage to Coca-Cola’s classic 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” campaign, and features AI-generated people and trucks, was slammed by social media users as “soulless” and “devoid of any actual creativity.”