Many people remember Coca-Cola's ill-conceived and poorly received AI-generated Christmas ad in 2024, largely due to the vocal backlash that followed.

But as Futurism reported, McDonald's either missed the memo or forgot about it, leading to a wave of negative feedback.

What's happening?

According to Futurism, McDonald's "decided to get in on the corporate slopfest" for a Christmas ad; "AI slop" is a pejorative neologism used to describe low-quality AI content. 

McDonald's has released an AI-generated Christmas ad

The studio behind it says they 'hardly slept' for several weeks while writing AI prompts and refining the shots — 'AI didn't make this film. We did'

Comments have been turned off on YouTube pic.twitter.com/Es5ROvI7n2

— Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave) December 8, 2025

The A.V. Club observed that the spot, titled "The Most Terrible Time of the Year," depicted a string of holiday mishaps and was "immediately and widely despised" upon its release.

Media coverage of the initial McDonald's AI advertisement emphasized its poor quality, citing "key tells" such as a lack of continuity, and likening it to a "visual seizure."

Remarkably, the ad managed to generate vocal backlash despite failing to accrue many views after it was uploaded. McDonald's initially turned off commenting on the YouTube advertisement before delisting it completely — though some users saved and shared copies beforehand.

Although the use of generative AI and the resulting poor quality of the spot were social media's biggest objections, the advertisement's negative framing didn't resonate either.

"It's not even so much that the AI was bad as the entire tone of the ad was stupid and insensitive so the slop on top just made it offensive from every angle," one person tweeted.  

"People LIKE Christmas, duh."

McDonald's ultimately made the advertisement private, effectively withdrawing it. The creative team behind the clip issued a statement defending the ad, claiming "up to 10" of their "in-house AI and post specialists" worked so hard generating AI results and editing them together that they "hardly slept." 

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That statement has been taken down as well after many users on X derided it and felt it only stood as further indictment on how much more the claim of sleepless nights working on the AI ad indicates they should have shot or animated a normal commercial instead.

Why is this important?

One of the biggest objections to the advance of generative AI is its impact on workers in creative fields, like art, publishing, and music.

McDonald's is a massive, powerful corporation with global reach, and consumers saw their use of AI in a holiday ad as lazy and miserly, perhaps an attempt to avoid paying human creators.

While valid worries about AI's potential to take jobs are part of the issue, they're far from its sum, and there are numerous beneficial uses of AI, such as identifying potential health problems and other scientific patterns across massive volumes of data. 

Generative AI is a nascent technology, and details like its environmental toll are still being assessed. However, it's undeniable that AI data centers are detrimental to the environment. Their excessive use of public energy costs has rapidly driven electricity bills skyward, for one thing.

Power isn't the only thing data centers consume — all of that computing generates heat, and these facilities strain and potentially contaminate water resources in their vicinity, destroying locals' quality of life.

Major players in the AI field, like OpenAI and Amazon, have been less than transparent about these public costs. 

At the same time, experts have warned that an "AI bubble" could wreak havoc on the economy, a concern even Google's CEO acknowledged was warranted.

What's being done about it?

McDonald's acted quickly to withdraw the ad under intense scrutiny, ostensibly acknowledging the ad was a mistake.

The chain of events, however, was an excellent example of the power of public pressure to rapidly effect corporate change.

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