The advertising trade press, which has long prided itself on chronicling the industry's triumphs and stumbles with equal vigor, occasionally reminds us that even the most carefully constructed news article can arrive at a reader's screen in a state of profound disassembly.
A recent item from Ad Age, bearing a headline about Equinox withdrawing an artificial-intelligence-generated advertisement after criticism that it trafficked in racist stereotypes of Asian people, delivered instead a curious pastiche: a survey statistic about industry pessimism, several biographical summaries of the publication's reporters, and what appeared to be a fragment of a corporate statement about government negotiations over AI model deployment.
The actual news — that Equinox, the luxury fitness chain owned by the Related Companies, had pulled creative work after public outcry — was nowhere to be found in the body text. (One imagines the relevant paragraphs are still circulating somewhere in the digital ether, perhaps doing light cardio.)
This is not, to be fair, an uncommon occurrence in the age of content management systems that seem to have been designed by people who have never met a paragraph they couldn't accidentally relocate. But it does present a challenge for those of us tasked with rewriting articles that do not, strictly speaking, exist.
What can be said is this: the intersection of generative artificial intelligence and advertising creative has produced a steady stream of cautionary tales over the past two years, as brands discover that the technology's apparent efficiencies sometimes come bundled with outputs that would have been flagged in the first round of a traditional review process.
Equinox, which has built its brand on a certain aspirational sleekness, presumably did not intend for this particular news cycle.
The article itself, meanwhile, awaits reassembly.
Original story published in adage.com: "Equinox pulls AI ad called out for racist Asian stereotypes - Ad Age"