Global fast food giant McDonald's is receiving extreme backlash over a 100% AI generated advert that critics are calling lazy and amoral. McDonald's have taken down their Christmas ad of just 45 seconds following public outrage that the whole 45-second holiday advert was produced with generative AI clips and prompts. The advert released on McDonald's Netherlands Youtube channel deactivated their comment section before removing the video of its channel and ending the campaign by McDonald's operations in the Netherlands.

Massive debate about the danger of AI in advertising is erupting on social media platform X, with the advert featuring a remix of the classic Christmas song 'It's the most wonderful Time of the Year' changed to 'It's the most terrible time of the year' which played in the background of AI-generated family encounters.

Angry viewers poured out their disappointment with the McDonald's holiday ad to X, with one writing: "Because replacing hard working people with machines is an amoral business practice."

Another commented: "This ad is miserable. Nothing that happens in it is something that couldn't be done by just filming. There was absolutely no reason to use AI other than braindead laziness. They couldn't have used a camera? Or real actors? McDonald's could afford to do that but didn't bother."

Tom Goodwin, Founder of the business transformation consultancy All We Have is Now and author of Digital Darwinism: Survival of the fittest in the Age of Business Disruption shared his opinion to his 53,000 X followers. He said:"The AI is pretty good but pretty much everything about the add falls flat. McDonald's work is often excellent with a soulful truth and humour to it. This just feels fleeting and careless and obvious, zero depth."

Others seemed to share how they thought the commercial aligned with the chain's reputation: "I always said generation AI is like McDonald's for art. Fits perfectly that they used it."

The row is currently trending on X with more than 100,000 posts, with one person writing: "The messaging is literally evil anti-life, anti-festive, anti-Christmas, anti-family, anti-tradition slop in promotion of gorging yourself while shutting yourself out from merriment."

The Sweetshop's executive Melanie Bridge, whose firm created the clip, tried to defend the advert by saying the production team "hardly slept" for several weeks while writing AI prompts and creating "thousands of takes" before settling on the final edit.

A handful of reactions to the video advert suggest the love affair with the cheeky McDonald's meal deal is over. With one comment that said: "It's bitter, mean spirited, irony poisoned and it doesn't make me want to eat at McDonald's."