It was a big-tech Super Bowl, where even the ads that weren’t about AI were about AI. Svedka’s AI-generated vodka ad went down like a shot of warm slop, and a self-referential ad for Artlist, a stock media company in the process of pivoting to AI, bragged that it was made in just five days for a few thousand dollars, through which it achieved almost perfect levels of aesthetic anonymity. The AI ad load was heavy enough to inflict collateral damage: On social media, hypervigilant viewers complained that ads from Dunkin’ Donuts and Comcast looked like they might have been AI generated, when they probably weren’t.

Every big-tech company is either all in on building AI or reorienting its businesses around it, and the Super Bowl offered a look at where the companies (or at least their marketing teams) seem to think they are. Meta, which has been struggling to stay part of the broader AI conversation, crammed the phrase “Athletic Intelligence” into a celeb-filled ad for its Oakley-branded smart-video glasses. Amazon’s ad cast Chris Hemsworth as an extreme AI paranoiac, which........

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