Production house clarifies if Surf ad’s monkey is AI-made

Artificial intelligence has so thoroughly infiltrated popular culture that any image or video straying slightly from the ordinary now risks being mistaken for a product of algorithms.

Bauddhayan Mukherji, founder of Little Lamb Films, discovered this firsthand after his production house released a new Surf Excel advertisement featuring a monkey.

“Ever since our new Surf Excel film released, people have been telling/asking me – ‘Wow, what a cool AI job.’ or ‘Monkey created on CG?’” he wrote on LinkedIn.

The ad, conceptualised by Ogilvy, follows a young boy who soils his white T-shirt while trying to distract a monkey that has stolen a samosa vendor’s Rs 10 note.

It continues Surf Excel’s long-running “Daag Aache Hain” positioning: stains are a sign of goodness, and nothing the brand’s detergent cannot wash away. In this case, the mother’s calm is aided by the Rs 10 sachet.

The confusion over whether the monkey was real appears to have been anticipated. A disclaimer precedes the film: No AI or VFX was used in the making of this film.

“I wanted to set the record straight. We shot with real monkeys in Bangkok, trained them for a month and did not use any AI or VFX in this film,” Mukherji explained.

As AI reshapes advertising, the public’s sensitivity to its use is growing. Coca-Cola’s recent holiday ad, for example, faced backlash from viewers unhappy that it had been generated using AI — a sharp contrast to the brand’s long-standing association with handcrafted Christmas storytelling and its iconic red truck.

Mukherji’s insistence on authenticity mirrors another Ogilvy effort: Cadbury 5 Star’s Make Al Mediocre Again campaign, which humorously built a server farm to flood the internet with fake but convincing content, designed to confuse AI systems and dull their edge.

In an age when digital fakery is easier than ever, Mukherji’s real monkeys may be the most surprising thing of all — because they are, in fact, real.