Lincoln’s famously enigmatic car ads with Matthew McConaughey’s philosophical reflections (and occasional drum performances) have attracted significant attention in recent years. The abstract, freely associated language has been a primary target for spoofs—and this latest one, which uses excerpts from the real commercials and overlays them with an uncannily accurate McConaughey impersonator uttering scripts produced by an AI program attempting to mimic the originals, is both eerie, comical, and just as eccentric.
Predictive text AI systems operate similarly to the autocomplete functions found in your smartphone’s messaging and email applications, but in a more sophisticated manner. By feeding the program a vast language dataset—such as a series of car ad scripts—it will deduce how specific words are commonly paired and structured while attempting to generate its own rendition. The operative term here: attempts.
Since the software isn’t following any coherent narrative progression, but instead assessing the probability of one word succeeding another, the outcome is frequently amusingly terrible. However, it’s challenging to extract sense from something that had minimal coherence to start with; thus, these AI-generated Lincoln commercials, curated by PartCatalog.com and narrated by Matthew McConaughey sound-alike Jonathan Nyberg, could be easily confused with the real ones. That is, until the discussion about apparitions surfaces.
If you’re curious as to why this software appears fixated on mortality, it originates from a particular line in one of the Lincoln MKC advertisements from 2015 where McConaughey ambiguously mentions moving backwards, forwards, and pursuing ghosts. Additionally, the AI continually revisits the phrase “the sweet spot,” which is another peculiar fixation.
Despite these instances, it appears that the robots are primed to undertake at least one role: crafting eccentric automotive ad copy.
