Editorial illustration for OpenAI’s alleged Super Bowl ad featuring earbuds and a shiny orb was a hoax
OpenAI's Super Bowl Ad Sparks AI Marketing Revolution
OpenAI’s alleged Super Bowl ad featuring earbuds and a shiny orb was a hoax
A Reddit post from a new account claimed to show OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad. It featured earbuds, a shiny orb, and actor Alexander Skarsgård with a gadget supposedly co-designed by Jony Ive. OpenAI President Greg Brockman called it "fake news." The account, which has been deleted, was run by a Santa Monica bookkeeper a year ago, according to an Internet Archive search. A paid promotion pitch for the hoax included a real payment of $1,146.12, and OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch flagged an entire fake website built to support the story.
OpenAI's supposedly 'leaked' Super Bowl ad with ear buds and a shiny orb was a hoax No, that isn't Alexander Skarsgård playing around with Jony Ive and OpenAI's first ChatGPT hardware gadget. No, that isn't Alexander Skarsgård playing around with Jony Ive and OpenAI's first ChatGPT hardware gadget. OpenAI president Greg Brockman commented on X with a tweet calling the story "fake news," and OpenAI spokesperson Lindsay McCallum Rémy wrote, "this is totally fake." Looking at it carefully, the fact that the account that "found" the advertisement is brand new was remarkably convenient.
The "wineheda" Reddit account behind the original post is now deleted, but a search through the Internet Archive reveals that just a year ago, the person behind it was looking to grow their business as a bookkeeper in Santa Monica -- it would be quite a career shift to suddenly become someone working on ads for OpenAI and Jony Ive in time for Super Bowl LX. Whoever was behind this hoax had been working on it for some time and approached spreading their story on multiple fronts. Max Weinbach tweeted screenshots of an email he'd received a week ago proposing promotion of a tweet about an OpenAI hardware teaser ad featuring Alexander Skarsgård, which apparently came with a real $1,146.12 payment.
And AdAge reporter Gillian Follett tweeted earlier today about a "fake headline" attributed to her, falsely portraying a story about OpenAI changing its Super Bowl ad, while OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch mentioned an "entire fake website" trying to back up the same thing.
The hoax worked because the idea was compelling: a celebrity, a famous designer, and OpenAI's first physical product. Next time, the fake leak will probably be more sophisticated. The basic check, according to AdAge's Gillian Follett and others who were impersonated, is to ask who benefits from pushing the story now.
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Common Questions Answered
How much did OpenAI spend on their first Super Bowl commercial?
OpenAI spent approximately $14 million for a 60-second commercial spot during the first half of Super Bowl LIX. The ad was strategically placed to reach around 130 million viewers who may have limited familiarity with AI technology.
Was the OpenAI Super Bowl commercial created using AI tools?
Despite having access to their text-to-video AI Sora, OpenAI created the commercial entirely by human artists. The company used Sora only for prototyping and idea exploration, with CMO Kate Rouch emphasizing that the ad was a "celebration of human creativity".
What was the visual style of OpenAI's Super Bowl commercial?
The commercial featured a distinctive pointillism-inspired animation style that transformed abstract dots into iconic images of human technological progress. The black-and-white animation traced humanity's innovations from early tools like fire and the wheel to modern breakthroughs including space exploration and ultimately AI applications.
Further Reading
- Papers with Code - Latest NLP Research — Papers with Code
- Hugging Face Daily Papers — Hugging Face
- ArXiv CS.CL (Computation and Language) — ArXiv
