09/05/2026
A Simi Valley coffee company has unveiled its latest marketing campaign, designed to appease both customers and shareholders with a solution nobody expected: making its advertisements look AI-generated by hand.
Customers had grown frustrated with the company’s reliance on artificial intelligence after the chain began removing water from iced coffees to fund image generation that, critics said, lacked the human touch people expect from a coffee company. In response, executives restored the original coffee pours and hired a makeup artist to manually add AI-style mistakes to every campaign.
The artist’s work includes extra fingers, slightly misplaced features, and the faintly unsettling look of a computer trying to understand a latte. The company said the practical effects team proves that jobs are being created through AI, even if those jobs mostly involve making humans appear replaceable.
“This gives us the best of both worlds,” an executive said. “Our customers can trust that a real human personally added every finger, while our shareholders can continue believing we’ve replaced humans with generative AI.”
Customers praised the decision, saying they were relieved to see the company spending extra money to bring back the human element in advertising.
“It is nice to know they are using practical effects,” one customer said. “We cannot afford to lose the art of cinema just because a coffee company needed another ad.”