Streaming services already cut up their content with annoying and often poorly-timed ads.
Now, thanks to new tech, your favorite movies and TV shows could soon be stuffed with AI-generated product placement, too.
In an announcement, Elon Musk’s AI company xAI unveiled a new tool called “Halftime” which “dynamically weaves AI-generated ads into the scenes you’re watching.” Instead of cutting to an ad break, Halftime manipulates the characters onscreen into deviating from the script and prominently brandishing a product of a marketer’s choice.
The tool is meant to make ad “breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions,” the company said.
A video demo shows off what this would look like in real TV series. During an episode of the legal drama “Suits,” Harvey Specter raises an AI-generated can of Coke in his hand and presents it to the camera, stopping his dialogue mid-sentence. Or in an episode of “Friends,” Joey reaches for a new pair of Beats headphones and puts them on with a smile on his face, a blatant anachronism for a series that started its run in the mid-90s.
In each case, the viewer can click a “learn more” button on screen, taking them to the product page. When they back out, the AI-generated ad disappears from memory like a bad dream, and the show returns to normal like nothing happened.
Halftime: Dynamically weaves AI-generated ads into the scenes you’re watching, so breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions.@krishgarg09 @yuviecodes @lohanipravin pic.twitter.com/KsJSow0lwy — xAI (@xai) December 8, 2025
Halftime wasn’t made by xAI, but by a trio of University of Waterloo students who participated in the company’s recent hackathon in San Francisco.
Krish Garg, the software’s cocreator, boasted in a LinkedIn post that he had won the event “by making ads invisible.”
“Halftime generates cutscenes and product placements in real time, perfectly matched to your interests,” he added.
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