Data from Inception Point AI suggests there are over 175,000 podcast episodes available on Spotify or Apple that are generated by artificial intelligence, and AI companies are churning out thousands of new episodes a day as part of a multi-billion industry. Spotify has even introduced features that essentially let you prompt your own podcast you want to listen to, because as if there weren’t enough podcasters in the world, you might want to create hosts that are just for you.
It’s the sheer numbers here that probably led someone in the marketing department at Warner Bros. to come up with the partnership with “Dog Pack,” a “podcast” hosted by two AI-generated dogs, as a means to promote its upcoming movie “The End of Oak Street.”
The two digital dog hosts, Goldie and Frenchie, welcomed onto their “show” Starbuck, who is the dog featured in “The End of Oak Street,” to ask about who was the best trained of his human co-stars, Ewan McGregor or Anne Hathaway, and what it was like being chased by dinosaurs on a tennis ball. The clip shows some behind the scenes footage of one of the real dog actors playing around on set, though Starbuck in the film is at times crafted from visual effects.
Look, this promo is pretty benign. This isn’t even a real “podcast” in which these AI dogs prattle on for an hour about the movie. It’s a 90-second ad, and frankly there are more important things to get angry about online than this. We can’t all be interviewing real life dogs all the time, as much as we love to.
But there was genuine annoyance and backlash to this clip when it dropped this weekend, calling it out as the type of thing that will actively turning people off seeing “The End of Oak Street,” like this guy who got some engagement out of his outrage. Others are wondering whether this also entails that there’s other AI-generated material in the movie (there’s not) or why someone would promote their movie this way when the biggest recent blockbusters like “Project Hail Mary” and “The Odyssey” have all sold themselves on their practical effects.
It also feels like a weird about-face for the movie’s own marketing. “The End of Oak Street” was originally sold with a bit of mystery and cloak and dagger, concealing what happens to this family after it seems as though their suburban home, along with their entire street, has been transported to some other dimension. Now the marketing very explicitly features dinosaurs chasing the family, to the point that Starbuck is talking about it and trying to appeal to moms on Facebook who might be among the nearly million followers to this AI feed.
It’s hard too to imagine director David Robert Mitchell — the guy who directed “It Follows” — seeing this ad campaign and saying yeah, I dig it. But we could be wrong. And maybe Warner Bros. is smart to make this film a bit more 4-quadrant. The film is projected for an opening between $25-35 million, a solid start for an original property opening in mid-August.
Warner Bros. did not respond to a request for comment on the marketing campaign.
