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Local production company owner Tex Kelly is well aware that some people disapprove of the generative AI technology he’s been using to make commercials for local businesses. He specifically recalls some negative comments he saw on Reddit, like this one, posted last month in response to a video ad he produced for Eureka Mexican restaurant Esmeralda’s 2.0:

“I loathe all of the AI bullshit that local businesses are using for ads. If you can’t do it in house, pay an artist.”

The comment had 54 up-votes, making it the top response to a post seeking opinions on the ad. 

“There’s always a bit of worry about harsh feedback … ,” Kelly acknowledged in a recent interview. “We’ll see an ‘AI slop’ comment every once in a while. But the majority of feedback has been really, really good.” [Disclosure: Kelly used to work for the Outpost’s parent company, Lost Coast Communications.]

When it comes to his own justification for embracing the technology, it’s pretty simple.

“I like it,” he said. 

More to the point, some of his clients like it. A couple of local business owners have specifically requested the use AI in their commercials because of the attention-grabbing imagery it can create, Kelly said.

Here’s that Esmeralda’s ad, which has been fairly ubiquitous on YouTube, social media and TV:

Kelly explained that recent advancements in generative AI — specifically Google’s VO3 program — allowed him to put computer-generated creatures into real-life local environments he’d photographed. Hence, he was able to “film” Bigfoot breaking out of Redwood Capital Bank (whose name he changed to avoid legal repercussions) and a Yeti flying a helicopter over real aerial views of Eureka.

He’s aware that the results aren’t perfect. (“It was supposed to be Bigfoot, which … Reddit users have said it obviously looks like a gorilla,” he said.) But the ad has made an impression and gotten a lot of people talking, which is one important measure of success in advertising.

“We’re always trying to do something that’s different to get people’s attention,” Kelly said.

That’s not sufficient justification for using AI, according to other locals who work in video production. AI imagery is inherently dishonest, they argue, and its use is actively depriving creative professionals of work.

Justin Grimaldo, a local editor and filmmaker, recently took to Facebook to make his opinion known.

“These aren’t just goofy experiments,” he wrote regarding local ads that employ AI. “Businesses are actually using this stuff in place of real video work—and it’s already pushing out talented local filmmakers and photographers.”

Grimaldo also feels that AI ads are often deceptive. He cited AI-generated real estate video tours and AI-enhanced images of restaurant interiors as examples of misleading consumers.

“Sure, you saved a few bucks today,” his post continued. “But long-term? You’re training your customers not to trust you. You’re also telling local creatives their work doesn’t matter—and that’s not just lazy, it’s a terrible investment in your brand.”

Reached by the Outpost, Grimaldo said he’s not against progress or new technology so much as he’s pro-transparency and human creativity. He thinks AI ads should be labeled as such, and he sees generative AI programs as a poor substitute for hard work and imagination.

“It’s one thing to use AI as a tool to enhance a human-driven vision, but it’s another to slap a few prompts into a generator and call it a day,” he said. “That’s not creative. That’s outsourcing imagination.”

Grimaldo is also not impressed with a lot of what AI generates. The technology is notoriously bad at rendering human hands, for example, and Grimaldo says it also has trouble making mouths and eyes move in realistic, organic-looking ways.

“AI still struggles with the subtleties of human expression, which makes a huge difference in storytelling … ,” he said. “[I]t’s missing soul. [AI imagery] mimics emotion but doesn’t generate it. … That said … give it a couple years. The tech is moving fast, and there’s no stopping that train. It will get harder to tell what’s real and what’s not. But for now, there’s still a noticeable gap and as someone who lives in the edit bay, that gap stands out.”

Kelly actually agrees with that, to an extent. He said nothing can replace the collaborative experience of working on non-AI productions, which he still does, and he supports the efforts of Hollywood labor unions to keep AI out of the feature film industry.

“A robot or something that’s been made by AI is not going to make you feel any depth of loss or anything like that,” he said.

He also doesn’t approve of big corporations using AI for their ads. He recalled the public blowback that came in response to an AI-generated Coca-Cola commercial last year and said the criticism was deserved.

“I think, when you have a budget that is that on that level, you know, you should flex your your muscles with an actual production,” he said. 

But Kelly just thinks local businesses should be granted a bit more leeway.

“If we’re managing a whole bunch of clients and [one of them] only has a three- or four-hundred-dollar budget to do an ad, I can create something with that, easily,” he said, referring specifically to the AI tools he subscribes to. 

Does he worry about taking away people’s jobs?

“No, because the person making those AI ads and editing them is me,” he said, adding that he still hires people to work on other ads.

Nor does he buy the idea that AI stifles human imagination. Quite the opposite, in fact. 

“What set me on to [AI] was that as I’m always thinking of crazy ideas: ‘If I had a million dollars, these are what I would be doing. I’d be breaking out of banks’ and stuff like that,” he said. AI has simply allowed him to make such ideas come to life.

Kelly recently collaborated with the owner of Hunan Chinese Restaurant in Eureka for a longer video that is almost entirely AI-generated. It’s called Wok Master:

In describing the origin of his idea for this video, Kelly touched on one of Grimaldo’s gripes.

“[Real] kitchens don’t look great,” he said. “There’s food everywhere on the pans and stuff, and you’re constantly cleaning that off, and people are moving around. … So, [in order] to not show the un-glorious side of things, we were like, ‘Let’s show a baby using a wok and growing up and coming to the U.S.”

That latter part of the storyline came from the owner, who moved to Humboldt County roughly 40 years ago, Kelly said.

Still, Kelly doesn’t see the glossy, computerized kitchen footage as inherently dishonest — at least, no more so than advertising has been for decades. The burgers you see in Carl’s Jr. and McDonald’s ads aren’t even real food, he said, and they’re hardly an accurate representation of the actual products. 

“I think people have been raised up on the over-embellishment or the overselling” in advertising, he said. “It’s something that they just don’t care about. If you’re entertaining and you’re making someone laugh, I think that’s what they’re going to remember.”

While Kelly may draw an ethical line between low-budget local ads and big-dollar corporate professionals, the larger advertising industry appears to have no such compunctions. A recent industry report found that, among marketers who spent more than $1 million on digital video ads last year, nearly 90 percent are using or plan to use generative AI in their video ads.

Some of those companies are grappling with the same issues as local professionals. A recent New York Times article on the topic noted, “There are ethical concerns about displacing writers, designers and artists. There are also concerns that the ads could fool viewers into thinking something is real when it is actually fake.”

Some companies, including the digital marketing agency Shuttlerock, do employ captions or logos that disclose when AI is used in an ad.

Asked whether he should be labeling his AI ads, too, Kelly said, “I think it’s obvious right now. But in the future?” He paused to think about it, then said, “That’s a tough one. … But I don’t think it has to be labeled, at least not right now. If it was, like, a president or someone saying a bomb threat or something like that, I feel like it would have to. … But right now it’s so obvious when you come across something that is AI.”

He reiterated that the most important thing is grabbing people’s attention and getting customers to walk through the doors for his clients.

We asked Grimaldo if he’d reject a client who specifically requested AI imagery in their commercial. He said he’s already done just that. 

”It might just be the artist in me, but when something starts replacing actual crew positions—DOPs [directors of photography], animators, VFX artists—it crosses a line I’m not comfortable with,” he said.

But then Grimaldo made an admission:

“I do use AI on the audio side for things like dialogue cleanup, denoising and other tedious tasks,” he said. “To me, that’s a tool, not a replacement. There’s a difference between using tech to enhance the work and using it to skip hiring real people.”

Regardless of where each person draws their ethical line with AI, one thing is clear.

“It won’t go away,” Kelly said. “There will be people who hate it and there’s gonna be people who love it. But I think you have to be able to craft something with it.”

He argued that, while anybody can now type in some text or upload a photo and ask AI to generate imagery, the art of filmmaking — even on the local commercial level — still requires certain human skills like editing and storytelling to be successful. 

“I think if you do something with it and actually create something that’s funny then, you know, that’s good,” Kelly said. “And if it helps the business, that’s obviously what matters the most.”