‘Dumb Ways To Die’ Creators Get AI To Make Something As Impactful, And… Well…

Video screenshot via Dumb Ways to Die

What if Dumb Ways to Die had been made in the age of artificial intelligence?

McCann Australia, the original brains behind the globally viral Metro Trains campaign, got AI to work on the same brief handed to its advertising creatives 12 years ago. The prompt was fed to ChatGPT, with the chatbot’s pitches later visualized on text-to-video generation tool Gen-2 by Runway—and the results were, well, interesting.

Here’s what ChatGPT was instructed to do:

“Act as an awarded creative director working in a Melbourne ad agency in 2012. Metro Trains has briefed a low-budget railway poster campaign to change unsafe behavior in teens and young drivers. We don’t think posters will be effective with this audience though, who are more engaged by digital, mobile, social media and music channels.”

The tool was tasked to work within a tight A$200,000 budget (about US$204,000 in 2012) and come up with three variants of a fresh, “highly creative campaign for teens and young adults” for curbing dangerous behaviors like platform edge-hanging, track-hopping, and ignoring boom gates. “To grab their attention, the creative shouldn’t feel like traditional public service announcements,” the prompt further outlined.

In turn, ChatGPT cooked up a recommendation for a music festival on a train platform, called ‘Track Beats’, with local artists weaving safety messages into their beats.

Images via Ben Lilley

It also dreamed up an “addictive” ‘Platform Puzzlers’ mobile game, where players had to steer clear from obstacles like speeding trains and the temptation of taking dangerous shortcuts, being rewarded “by making safe choices” and losing points “for risky behavior.”

Images via Ben Lilley

For its third and final idea, ChatGPT proposed a flash mob challenge (remember those?) at busy stations, with choreography “[emphasizing] safe behaviors.” 

While these solutions are feasible, they’re comparably dull and lack the punchiness and timelessness of the original animation, which—over a decade later—still drives daily views and comments.

The mobile game, for one, might have faced initial download hurdles. Similarly, commuters would have likely forgetten about the flash mob past 2012. Dumb Ways to Die has aged extremely well and might have gone just as viral if it were launched in today’s TikTok-loving landscape.

This experiment highlights AI’s existing shortcomings in creative brainstorming and being original. It was built on the backs of ideas already thought up by humans, after all. In this case, the Dumb Ways to Die team’s creative spark proved unbeatable. Revel in its brilliance by rewatching the video below.

[via Ben Lilley, images via various sources]