Driven By Intuition: Car By Lexus, Story By Artificial Intelligence, Directed By The Oscar-Winning Kevin Macdonald

Lexus, a brand famous for being at the leading edge of tech-innovation, rolled out Driven by Intuition, an advert that has been scripted entirely by artificial intelligence.

For the specific project, Lexus partnered with their creative agency, The&Partnership London, they also partnered Visual Voice and the IBM Watson team.

Along with other data, AI is being used to analyze award-winning car and luxury brand ads and picked out the common elements to create a script outline. It has been shot by the Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald, the director of The Last King of Scotland, Whitney Houston’s Whitney and the Oscar-winning documentary, One Day in September.

The innovative creative approach to the project is perfectly aligned with the qualities of the new model ES that can sense the driver’s intentions and changing road and traffic conditions.  In using so much information about previous adverts, it was important to avoid the risk of producing something that felt familiar, or too mass-market in tone. Thus additional data on the Lexus brand and the project guideline were input into the AI to keep the script original and on-brand.

Macdonald was highly intrigued by the concept and put an effort to make a differ the project from conventional film. He commented,

When I was handed the script, the melodrama of the story convinced me of its potential. The fact the AI gave a fellow machine sentience, placed it in a sort of combat situation, and then had it escaping into the sunset was such an emotional response from what is essentially a digital platform. The charmingly simplistic way the AI wrote the story was both fascinating in its interpretation of human emotion, and yet still unexpected enough to give the film a clearly non-human edge.

Dave Bedwood, Creative Partner at The&Partnership said,

I thought I’d be writing an ad with the assistance of AI. Instead it took over and wrote the whole script: a machine telling the story of a machine coming to life. Much AI work to date has been interesting because of the process itself; this has been because the end product is good in its own right.

Vincent Tabel, Senior Manager Brand and Communications, Lexus Europe also said,

Here at Lexus we love to push the boundaries of technology and design, and that’s why we wanted to do something completely different – a world first – to launched the new Lexus ES. The ES is both intuitive and innovative, so we wanted the advert to reflect this. The resulting film surpasses our expectations of what an AI is capable of, from its creativity to its human emotion.

We’re witnessing how storytelling come to life in the human creative process, and realize that creative work is an example of how man and machine will collaborate in artificial intelligence business.