Product placement has existed for almost as long as moving pictures themselves, with the origins of the practice dating all the way back to the 1890s. It’s worked well enough for over 100 years, and has linked brands to some of the most memorable moments in film history, like Reese’s Pieces showing up in E.T. But there is a problem with product placement as it currently exists: Because it is often worked into a scene, it isn’t jarringly disruptive nor does it give the viewer a sense of the uncanny valley. Luckily, xAI is set to fix that.
The AI company owned by Elon Musk recently hosted a hackathon that invited people to build new features and functionality with the company’s AI models. One group of upstart engineers created Halftime, described as a tool that “Dynamically weaves AI-generated ads into the scenes you’re watching, so breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions.”
It is, frankly, awful. Not just in theory (the absolute best case scenario here is that you see more brands and products littered in the universe of your favorite show, some of which will inevitably be anachronistic and out of place), but in practice—though we’ll extend the slightest bit of grace knowing that this thing was hacked together in 24 hours.
In a demo that uses the TV show “Suits,” actor Gabriel Macht, in character as attorney Harvey Specter, is manipulated by generative AI to be shown holding a can of Coca-Cola. It’s very hammy, aimed almost directly to the camera, and feels incredibly out of place as it cuts off a line of dialogue and has the AI insert mumbles something incoherent. When the scene does resume, the character is immediately handed a coffee, making the whole thing even stranger. In a second example that uses a scene from “Friends,” Matt LeBlanc’s character Joey stops mid-sentence to put on a pair of Beats headphones, a thing that did not exist at any point during the show’s run. The demo shows a user hovering a mouse over the headphones and being offered a link to buy them.
Halftime: Dynamically weaves AI-generated ads into the scenes you’re watching, so breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions.@krishgarg09 @yuviecodes @lohanipravin pic.twitter.com/KsJSow0lwy
— xAI (@xai) December 8, 2025
One of the creators of Halftime, Krish Garg, bragged on LinkedIn that his team won the hackathon by “making ads invisible.” Bad news, my guy: Everyone can see this, and it sucks.
The theory driving Halftime isn’t entirely new. Even before the generative AI boom, there were companies offering ways to digitally inject ads into media, including retroactively slipping product placement into classic films. But a tool like this goes a step further, actually using the likeness of actors to put words in their mouths and products in their hands. It has all sorts of implications, none of them good.
It’s worth noting that Halftime isn’t a real product or service that is being offered by xAI, just something that some students hacked together with the company’s tech over a weekend. Hopefully, the visceral reaction that it produced online, with the majority of people who aren’t AI slop simps calling for the tool to be destroyed before it destroys media, will be enough to keep it from ever being more than that.
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