Volvo's AI-Generated Ad In Saudi Arabia Pulled Because It Was 'Not In Line With Volvo Cars' Global Guidelines'

Volvo has pulled an AI-generated ad made for Saudi Arabia because it is "not in line with Volvo Cars' global guidelines." The ad, titled "Come back stronger," initially received a glowing writeup in AdWeek, but it was also hard to understand how it was ever approved in the first place. Aside from the part where the car ad didn't include any cars, artificial intelligence is incredibly energy intensive and notoriously awful for the planet. Volvo, on the other hand, says it's committed to slashing emissions and saving the planet, so you'd think AI would have been a "no" even before anyone suggested using it.

Still, Volvo could have offset the emissions created by the ad that, according to AdWeek, was "[p]roduced by Dubai-based Lion Creative for Volvo's Europe, Middle East and Africa Division and Electromin, the automaker's Saudi distributor." So I did what any respectable journalist would do and asked a Volvo rep about it. They weren't able to answer my questions immediately, presumably since the people who could actually answer my questions live at least six hours in the future. Today, we have Volvo USA's official statement: "We are aware of the ad in Saudi Arabia. It was a local initiative, not in line with Volvo Cars' global guidelines. The ad is being taken down/withdrawn."

While the video was still listed on Volvo KSA's YouTube channel earlier this morning, it has since been taken down. The internet never forgets, though, and conveniently, our friends at CarScoops still have a copy you can watch. Just don't expect anything too exciting. According to AdWeek, our western eyes won't get it because it was made specifically for a Saudi Arabian audience:

To a western eye, it can be a challenge to see how this interplay of rhetoric and images might speak to an American car buyer—but of course, that's not the target audience here. Narrated in Arabic (though there is an English version), the ad is a mélange of "technically accurate and culturally resonant renders for Saudi Arabia," Lion's founder and executive creative director Osama Saddiq told ADWEEK.

And while I would love to tell you I personally killed a bad car ad in the same way I most likely personally gave the PR rep a headache Thursday night, the ad generated plenty of controversy on its own. In fact, the pushback ended up being strong enough that AdWeek published a follow-up editorial from an ad exec who defended the use of AI. Notably, though, that editorial doesn't include the words, "environment," "sustainability," "emissions" or "carbon." You'd think that would be the top concern here, but maybe it's just more convenient to leave that part out. It's less fun to talk about AI when someone insists on bringing up how terrible it is for the planet we live on.

At this point, no one actually believes human-caused climate change isn't real. There will be people in the comments section claiming they do, but they know. Admitting it publicly, though, would mean the other team was correct all along, and they're too Facebook-pilled to ever do that. Better to bury their heads in the sand or buy a spot in an underground city like they had in Paradise. In a world where we'd listened to the scientists and got our energy from sustainable sources, AI's insatiable thirst for electricity would be less of a problem. In reality, though, you simply can't ethically use AI if you care about the planet in the slightest. 

Still, it can be hard to understand just how much energy AI uses. As a review from the Polytechnic Institute of Paris points out, getting an answer from ChatGPT uses 10 times the energy compared to a regular Google search. Still, that doesn't fully illustrate the scale we're talking about, especially since Fancy Autocomplete is pretty efficient compared to image generation. Creating a single AI image requires about 40 times more energy than text generation does, making an AI video several orders of magnitude worse than asking Grok to steal a recipe for you. It's also difficult to estimate exactly how much energy is used specifically for AI, but over the next couple years, AI will likely end up using between 85 billion and 134 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. And you know what they say — a billion kWh here, a billion kWh there, and pretty soon you're talking real emissions.

If that still doesn't put it into perspective for you, the same review cites an International Energy Agency estimate that suggests that between 2022 and 2026, the increase in energy demands from data centers, cryptocurrencies and AI will be on par with the entire country of Sweden's on the low end and Germany's on the high end. The review was also published in November of last year, so if anything, newer models likely use even more energy than the estimates used to arrive at those conclusions. And while some companies work to offset some of those emissions, Google's latest environmental report showed even those efforts haven't been enough, saying, "Our [2023] emissions [...] have increased by 37% compared to 2022, despite considerable efforts and progress in renewable energy. This is due to the electricity consumption of our data centres, which exceeds our capacity to develop renewable energy projects."

Ultimately, it's almost impossible to use AI and also limit the damage of global climate change since we need to be reducing our emissions, not increasing them. As Anne-Laure Ligozat, a professor of computer science at ENSIIE and LISN, put it, "None of the arguments put forward by Google to reduce AI emissions hold water." And while models may get more efficient, that will also encourage people to use them more frequently. "This tends to cancel out any potential energy savings," Ligozat's co-author Alex de Vries wrote. "My main argument is that AI should be used sparingly."

So while no one working for a company that claims to believe in science and wants to hit net-zero by 2040 should have approved an AI ad, at least the people at the top were willing to retract the ad. And, hopefully, automakers that say they believe in science will refrain from using AI ads in the future.