Creative agency, GOVT Singapore, is clocking up an impressive collection of walk on the wild side festive commercials for, biscuit brand, Julie’s. This one, Iklan Raya A.I.dilfitri (A Raya A.I.dilfitri Ad), for Hari Raya, takes on gender norms and stereotypes, with a unique narrative that is entertaining first and foremost.
It follows the journey of a fictional marketing team at Julie’s who are on a quest to create the perfect Hari Raya advertisement using generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), AdGPT. The marketing team struggles as they attempt to break free from the ideas suggested by the AI that focus on traditional gender roles during the festive season. Despite their efforts to manually edit the prompt and content, the AI-generated ads consistently emphasises these stereotypical Hari Raya scenes of women cooking in the kitchen and men engaging in lighter tasks in the living room amongst many other stereotypes, reinforcing outdated gender norms.
In a telling twist when trying to fix the AI, the team finds themselves immersed within the AI realm itself, encountering a child, the embodiment of the AI. Through this encounter, they discover the root cause of the biased AI-generated content. Themsleves. It comes from years of societal conditioning and ingrained stereotypes. Despite all that, they discover a beacon of hope – changing these outdated views is possible. These biases can change by telling new stories, particularly during celebrations like Hari Raya which emphasises forgiveness and renewal.
Tzy Horng Sai, director of Julie’s Biscuits, stated, “This marks Julie’s fourth year producing short festive films of this nature. We are passionate about continuously using our platform to spark meaningful conversations and drive positive change. In crafting this year’s film, we aimed to shed light on society’s role in perpetuating gender stereotypes while advocating for gender equity, all while honouring traditions. We hope it serves as more than just entertainment; let it be an inspiration for change. By teaching and modelling equality, we hope to lend a hand in creating a future where there are fewer assigned gender roles, where women and men can both contribute equally in their own ways.”
Kevin Poh, group creative director at GOVT, added, “When we started brainstorming for this, we were surrounded by debates and discussions about AI and were particularly interested in the gender and cultural biases found in AI. Through testing, we spotted gender stereotypes in the generated results despite trying to reword our prompts. We quickly realised a fundamental truth: AI learns from humans and mirrors our biases. The good news is, AI can learn to unlearn those biases if we can too. Since Raya is also about renewal, we thought it the perfect timing to reflect on these biases and start a clean slate about the way we see and talk about gender — in a way that’s meta, self-referential and, as always, loads of fun.”
