film / tv / celeb / substack / news / social media / pajiba love / about / cbr
film / tv / politics / news / celeb

AI To Invade Super Bowl, Giving You Another Reason Not To Watch

By Andrew Sanford | News | January 30, 2025 |

GettyImages-2195198427.jpg
Header Image Source: Photo by Tyler Kaufman/Getty Images

I won’t act like I’ve never watched the Super Bowl. Like most Americans, I’ve been forced to attend a party thrown by my roommates to watch two teams I don’t care about slamming into each other in between multi-million dollar commercials. While doing so, I consumed wings, drank too much beer, and spent the next morning wondering why I did any of that. Wings are great! I don’t really drink beer anymore, and over the years, I’ve come to hate the NFL.

No sports league is perfect. Far from it! Regardless, the NFL often gets caught up in bulls*** culture wars that I don’t want to pay attention to. That’s when they’re not ruining a player’s career because he kneeled against racial injustice, or studying the brains of Black men differently when it comes to head injuries. When Colin Kaepernick was ousted, I would maybe dabble in a Super Bowl game or two. When the report about concussion testing came out, I pulled a Spongebob meme and said, “I’m good.”

Now, the NFL has granted me another reason not to watch grown men risk permanent brain damage (which is a feature, not a bug). This year’s Super Bowl will be laden with AI commercials! Yup, the thing that nobody asked for is invading one of the biggest events of the year. “AI is coming. If it’s not already here in almost every business, it will be coming like a freight train,” explained Mark Evans, executive vp ad sales for Fox Sports, to The Hollywood Reporter. “So you will see some more AI-focused creative, which I think intuitively would be expected.” Thanks, Mark, I hate it!

Fox was allegedly paid as much as $8 million for 30-second ad spots, which is a record for the network. It also speaks to how much of a cash-suck AI companies are. With the recent news that a Chinese AI app has launched at a fraction of the cost of its AI counterparts, the idea that American AI companies are shelling out big bucks to pull people’s attention away from movie trailers and a When Harry Met Sally mayonnaise commercial is laughable. If only there was another instance of big tech companies pushing a fad product at the Super Bowl. Let me check in on my Crypto.com account for a second and I’ll get back to you.

Oh, wait! How could I forget Matt Damon walking through a hall of nonsense telling us how money was about to be decentralized in favor of cryptocurrency?! Surely, I only forgot because crypto has become so normalized that I simply refer to it as “The People’s Money” now. Within the next few years, I’ll forget all about my fear of AI as I’m prompting a new program to create a new group of friends with whom I can smugly mock the NFL. Coincidentally enough, Kaepernick may be able to help me with that.

I hate it here.