Have you seen Swisscom's latest commercial yet? It is titled “Discover Your Possibilities” and has been airing on TV and social since June this year. The commercial is about a dad who, in order to get his daughter to fall asleep, asks artificial intelligence to invent a story. The AI creates a fairy tale starring a “monster princess” (inspired by the child's hat), which he tells to his daughter. Later, again thanks to the AI, he asks for the illustrations, prints them into a real book, shares it online, and ... boom! The book goes viral and is even made into a movie. Happy ending: dad and daughter at the movies, eyes full of wonder.
Too bad that, beneath the glossy surface, this story hides according to more than one critical issue. And in my opinion, the fact that it comes from Swisscom-a company 51 percent owned by the Swiss Confederation-makes it all the more disturbing.
Above is the cover of the Swisscom commercial.
1. A behemoth enters an already fragile industry with a heavy hand
The book created in the commercial did not remain an advertising fantasy. Swisscom actually printed 6,950 copies of the book written and illustrated with artificial intelligence and distributed them as part of the campaign. This is problematic because the picture book publishing industry is already in dire straits: writers, illustrators, publishers, and bookstores face precarity, competition, and cutbacks every day. Not to mention the looming artificial intelligence, which threatens to totally replace these professions.
When a giant like Swisscom - with immense economic means and visibility, and moreover mostly owned by the Swiss Confederation and thus a public service - decides to self-produce and self-publish a book generated entirely by artificial intelligence, it sends an implicit but powerful message: "To make a book you don't need professionals. All you need is a prompt."
Result? An entire professional ecosystem is devalued, as if a few clicks are enough to replace years of study, practice, passion.
2. Artificial intelligence neither "writes" nor "illustrates" anything new
The preface of the book states that it was written and illustrated by artificial intelligence. But this is a misleading simplification.
Artificial intelligence does not create from nothing: it reworks existing material, learned from texts and images made by humans. It does not invent. It remixes. And it does so by drawing - almost always without consent - on content created by authors, illustrators, designers, artists who have devoted a lifetime to developing a style, a personal language.
The material produced by AI comes from a reworking of human ideas, but without any recognition or compensation for those who unknowingly provided the building blocks of creation. And this cannot be normal and correct in a society with human intelligence, in my opinion it just cannot.
3. A wrong invitation to parents
The commercial, in an implicit but very clear way, invites parents to do the same: use AI to create picture books together with their children. Or use AI in general, to “discover the possibilities” that this tool can offer. But this seemingly creative and inclusive proposal runs the risk of completely trivializing the creative process.
A child who relies on a machine to “illustrate his story” does not really train his imagination. He merely receives something ready-made, predictable. He does not experience the pleasure (and effort!) of making mistakes, improving, inventing. He does not test his divergent thinking. He does not develop a personal language.
Creativity has no shortcuts. It is cultivated in boredom, in trial and error, in slowness. In a hyper-connected world full of stimuli, training creativity also means learning to stay a little “unplugged,” to find solutions by oneself, to build with one's own hands.
Technology should be understood, not idolized
I am not against artificial intelligence. It is a tool, and as such it can be useful or harmful depending on how you use it. But you cannot think of introducing a “chainsaw” into the hands of people who have not yet learned how to use a knife. Or a racing Ferrari to those who are taking driving school.
If a child has not yet developed the skills to write, draw, analyze a text, evaluate a story, construct an image... how will he ever judge the output of an AI? How will it be able to understand what is valid, beautiful, original?
Feeding AI to children, without context, without awareness, is a mistake. It does not make them more creative. It only makes them more dependent on a system that, by its nature, does not create: it repeats.
A reflection that affects us all
Swisscom, as a public company, should contribute to the collective good, not promote patterns that undermine the creative growth of the younger generation and devalue entire professional sectors. We cannot ignore these signals.
And what do you think?
Have you seen the commercial yet?
Have you ever used artificial intelligence to create anything?
Tell me about it in the comments.
I'd love to gather different opinions and open an honest discussion about how we want to approach, together, this new technological revolution.
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