When it comes to the creative side of advertising, the promise of artificial intelligence--that it could create ads optimized in every possible way--has mostly been the subject of satire. Twitter gave birth to a meme about forcing bots to watch 1,000 hours of programming to write hilariously flawed (and fictional) scripts, and Burger King took the joke mainstream by making an ad campaign supposedly written by AI, which celebrated a chicken sandwich that "tastes like bird." In launching that campaign, Burger King's global head of brand management, Marcelo Pascoa, noted, "Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for a great creative idea coming from a real person." Now Lexus has put that claim to the test. The automaker and agency The&Partnership have created what they describe as the first ad both written by an AI and directed by an Oscar winner (Kevin Macdonald, who won Best Documentary for One Day in September in 2000).