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
When the NFL’s biggest night loomed, social feeds lit up with a clip that looked like an official OpenAI commercial—sleek earbuds, a glimmering orb, and a cameo that many assumed featured Hollywood star Alexander Skarsgård alongside design legend Jony Ive. The video spread fast, prompting speculation that the AI lab was finally unveiling a dedicated ChatGPT hardware device. Tech blogs, fan forums, and even a few mainstream outlets ran with the story, treating the footage as a rare glimpse behind the curtain of OpenAI’s product pipeline.
Yet, as the rumor mill churned, no press release or confirmation from the company emerged, and the visual cues—especially the polished orb—bore a striking resemblance to a well‑known fan‑made edit. In the days that followed, fact‑checkers dug into the source files and traced the clip back to a meme account, not a corporate media team. The fallout underscores how quickly a fabricated teaser can masquerade as legit advertising, especially when it leans on recognizable names and sleek design cues.
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'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 clip that circulated online never came from OpenAI. Screenshots from a now‑deleted Reddit thread show a disgruntled employee claiming to have “leaked” a Super Bowl spot featuring earbuds, a shiny orb and a cameo by Alexander Skarsgård, yet the video was later identified as fabricated. OpenAI has not confirmed any such advertisement, and the company’s official channels contain no record of a ChatGPT hardware gadget or a collaboration with Jony Ive.
Because the post was removed and the footage cannot be traced to a legitimate source, the story rests on a single, unverified claim. Whether OpenAI ever intended to air a Super Bowl commercial remains unclear, and the episode adds another layer of confusion to the company’s already noisy public profile. What is certain is that the purported ad was a hoax, and any narrative built on it should be treated with caution until corroborated by reliable evidence.
Further Reading
- Papers with Code - Latest NLP Research - Papers with Code
- Hugging Face Daily Papers - Hugging Face
- ArXiv CS.CL (Computation and Language) - ArXiv
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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.