Toys R Us unveiled a video made with a new artificial intelligence tool at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, but not everyone wants to be a Toys R Us AI kid. The toy retailer said in a statement that it's the first branded video made with Sora, a text-video tool from ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Sora isn't available to the public yet, but the company was given special early access.
The minute-long AI-generated video features a young boy dressed as Charles Lazarus, the late Toys R Us founder. He falls asleep and wakes up in a dream world filled with all kinds of toys, including a cartoon version of the store's mascot, Jeffrey the Giraffe. A wistful version of the store's “I want to be a Toys R Us kid” jingle plays, while photos of the real Lazarus posing with a costumed version of Jeffrey are shown.
The teaser was released on YouTube, but to watch the full video you'll need to head over to Toys “R” Us Studios' site.
Toys R Us closed its last U.S. stores in 2021, but has since opened toy department stores inside Macy's department stores, keeping the nostalgic name alive.
But some of the now-grown Toys R Us kids were uneasy about their childhood icon making the leap into the world of artificial intelligence.
More than 9,500 people liked a tweet from writer and comedian Mike Drucker on X. “I love that this commercial says, 'Toys R Us began as the dream of a little boy who wanted to share his imagination with the world,' and to show how we did it, we fired our artists, dried up Lake Superior with a server farm, and created a Stephen King nightmare world,” Drucker wrote.
AI-based video, music, and dialogue continues to stir controversy in the entertainment industry, from concerns that AI will replace human workers to worries about how easy it is to pass off AI images and voices as real. Some reactions to AI have been positive. In 2023, former Beatle Paul McCartney said that an AI program was used to extract the voice of the late John Lennon from old tapes to create what was said to be the Beatles' final song.
But last month, Sony Music Group and its affiliates spoke out against using songs by their artists to train AI systems. Songs using AI to imitate the voices of singers Drake and The Weeknd were submitted for two Grammy Awards categories in 2023, forcing the music academy to quickly set rules for AI and the awards. Singer Taylor Swift and President Joe Biden have also had their voices imitated by people plotting fraud. Any new foray into the world of AI always seems to raise questions, and with a brand name as well-known as Toys”R”Us, backlash seems inevitable.
“I had no intention of hiring a giraffe.”
Asked by NBC News about criticism that AI could replace human workers, Toys R Us Studios president Kim Miller-Orko said there is “a lot of fear out there” about AI. Miller-Orko said the video took about 12 people to make over the course of three months, the same number as in any job that doesn't involve AI.
“Jeffrey is animation. He's a cartoon,” Miller-Orko told NBC. “We weren't going to hire a giraffe, you know? This was animation.”
Representatives for Toys R Us and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
What is Sora?
“SORA” means sky in Japanese, and as CNET's Connie Guglielmo wrote in February, the AI tool has been gaining attention for its ability to create photorealistic videos.
“Sora can generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and precise details of subjects and backgrounds,” the company says on its website. “The model understands not only what the user requests in the prompts, but also how those things exist in the physical world.”
Open AI also said on its website that it is building tools to help detect misleading content, including a detection classifier that can determine that a video was generated by Sora, and that it plans to include C2PA metadata indicating that Sora was used in OpenAI products.
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