The world's gone mad

Sunday Serendipity - Volume 2

Welcome back to Sunday Serendipity 🧞

Ever wonder what happens when you combine humor, creativity, and AI?

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This past Wednesday, the first fully AI-generated commercial ran on national TV during Game 3 of the NBA Finals. It was an ad for Kalshi, a platform where people bet on everything from election outcomes to the price of eggs.

Their slogan: “The world’s gone crazy. Trade it.”

Kalshi hired PJ Accetturo to “make the most unhinged NBA Finals commercial possible”. I think they succeeded.

Accetturo posted his entire production process with prompts and all:

This took about 300–400 generations to get 15 usable clips. One person, 2-3 days.

That’s a 95% cost reduction vs traditional ads.

This is wild to fathom.

It used to take dozens of people months to come up with these kinds of ads. Now they can be created by one person in just a few days with a budget of $2000. Since costs have plummeted with the rise of AI, the thread points out two important factors to keep an eye on:

1. Brands still pay for taste and creativity

2. The value of humor in todays world

I see so much talk of AI taking jobs and the impending doom it will cause.

It’s true, AI will take jobs, but as we’ve seen throughout history, humans are great at adapting and finding new problems to work on.¹

So instead of complaining, I’m doing my best to learn these tools and incorporate them in my daily workflow. Because as

Lauren Razavi

pointed out, AI won’t replace writers, it will just reward the ones who have good taste:

Originality isn’t about isolation. It’s about arrangement. The ability to notice what lands, to shape what already exists into something that feels inevitable.

Every artist samples. Every writer quotes. Every DJ loops. AI just makes the layers visible and allows you to move faster. It’s not imitation. It’s intuition at scale. The ones who thrive won’t be the fastest typists; they’ll be the sharpest listeners. The ones brave enough to experiment, discover, learn.

The Kalshi commercial is proof we’re living through a modern day Renaissance powered by code and curiosity.

Those who have good taste and can adapt to using these new tools will thrive:

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My other big takeaway from Accetturo’s thread is to inject humor into whatever I’m creating. In a world gone mad, it might be one of the most valuable skills to learn:

Right now the most valuable skill in entertainment and advertising is comedy writing.

If you can make people laugh, they’ll watch the full ad, engage with it, and some of them will become customers.

Until next time my friends,

<3 B

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1. The thing that comes to mind is the great horse manure crisis of the 1890’s. The biggest challenge facing cities back then was what to do with all the horse manure. Unless policy makers could find a way to tackle this problem, London risked being buried under horse manure by the 1950’s so they hired a bunch of people to be pooper scoopers. Then the automobile was invented which also meant many horse related jobs were no longer needed and instead a whole set of new roles were created for the displaced workers.