Here comes an AI advertising campaign that could ruffle some feathers in Hollywood.

AI text-to-video platform OpenArt AI is launching ads in AMC movie theaters in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York this week to promote its Director product, the company exclusively told CMO Insider. The push also includes billboards in those cities, as well as digital and social placements.

Director allows users to describe an idea, visual style, and narrative arc in conversational language and then generates videos up to five minutes long.

The company said it hopes the campaign, created entirely in-house using the Director tool, will spark a wave of “vibe directing,” echoing the rise of “vibe coding,” and inspire newcomers to create microdramas, music videos or ads.

“I don’t think we’re trying to be provocative, but it’s just that we think the audience is a really good fit,” Stella Guan, head of growth and operations at OpenArt AI, told me when I asked whether targeting the campaign at moviegoers was designed to upset the hornet’s nest.

AI has sparked a backlash within Hollywood’s creative community over the technology’s potential to destroy jobs and the proliferation of low-quality “AI junk.” However, a growing segment of the industry, including Ben Affleck and Martin Scorsese, have become more open to adopting it to streamline and improve their technical work.

Founded in 2022 by two former Google employees, OpenArt AI says it has grown to 8 million monthly active users. In January, the company raised a $30 million Series A round led by Canaan Partners.

The company’s internal studio, made up of six creative directors, spent four days generating ideas for the ad using the Director product. The company held a marathon “movie night” screenings before selecting the final location.

The ad shows a man eating a hot dog on a bench next to a basketball court. He is then approached by a “coach” character blowing a whistle and wielding a laptop. The man tells the trainer that he always wanted to make a movie about a penguin in the desert.

The trainer writes it in OpenArt and explains that he can create any video he wants, “even a microdrama.”

The man protests: “I don’t watch microdramas.”

OpenArt AI said its budget for the Director’s marketing campaign is “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.

Countering criticism of AI

Some consumers are averse to AI-generated ads. A survey released in January by IAB and Sonata Insights found that 30% of Gen Z respondents said brands using AI in ads were “inauthentic,” while 26% said they were “out of touch” and 24% were “unethical.”

Moral panic about AI aside, James Poulter, CEO of AI consultancy ThreePoint Labs, said AI companies need to be careful not to oversell the capabilities of their platforms to everyday users.

“All the models exaggerate how easy it is to create the top 1% of greats,” Poulter said. “No matter how capable the models are of creating out-of-the-box cinematic things, if you don’t have the language of cinema or you’re not a director, you can’t direct the model to deliver something similar to someone who does have that language.”

Guan said much of the criticism about the use of AI in advertising and other creative work could be attributed to people not being aware of how far the technology has progressed since its early iterations.

She hopes the announcement will show that AI is producing higher-quality results fit for the big movie screen.

“I think this alone is a great example of the capabilities of our product as well as the technology,” Guan said.