Until recently, the dominant public opinion about artificial intelligence has sounded like a cautionary tale, warning of job loss, surveillance, bias and dystopian robots out to get us. While that framing is rooted in legitimate concern, it has largely cast AI as something foreign, risky and potentially malicious.

But this month, a shift happened. AI stopped lurking in the shadows of our fears and became a main attraction during the Super Bowl ads. (1)

During one of the most-watched cultural events of the year, AI wasn’t just mentioned; it became the whole conversation. In fact, nearly a quarter of this year’s commercials featured explicit AI messaging or AI-generated creative work. (2) It was celebrated. It was debated. It was mocked. It was treated not as a feature, but as a character, protagonist and sometimes antagonist in their narratives. (3)

While some brands leaned into optimism, showing AI as a helpful friend and productivity enhancer, others used it as comedic fuel.

The vodka brand Svedka went so far as to create what they advertised as the first primarily AI-generated Super Bowl ad, complete with surreal robots dancing at a human party. The intention was twofold. On the surface, the ad leaned into spectacle and novelty, using AI’s visual strangeness to grab attention in an already crowded advertising environment. More subtly, it framed AI as playful and culturally fluent rather than threatening. By embedding AI into a familiar social setting, a party, the brand attempted to domesticate the technology, positioning it as something that belongs in everyday life.

Other companies took a more self-aware approach. AI company Anthropic, for example, used satire to poke fun at a rival AI firm’s monetization strategy. The humor worked because audiences are now familiar enough with AI to recognize the joke. (5)

This signals an important shift. AI is no longer a niche topic but part of mainstream cultural literacy. People no longer need to be told what AI is — they already know. The humor was born out of familiarity, not confusion.

Google, Meta and Amazon, among others, positioned AI as enhancing everyday experiences, making the technology feel more approachable and maybe even human-centered. (5)

This year’s Super Bowl ads went beyond increased brand visibility. They helped normalize AI as a competitive, consumer-facing industry, complete with personalities, rivalries and narratives audiences could follow. In doing so, the commercials subtly reframed AI from an abstract technological force into something more human, commercial and part of popular culture. (4)

Even ads that initially seemed purely comedic, playing on nostalgia or humor, signal a broader cultural acceptance. The danger with this is not AI itself appearing in commercials, but that repeated friendly or comedic portrayals may smooth over legitimate public concerns. AI is moving from a foreign idea that needs to be explained to a technology that is known and assumed. This transition can both reduce fear and dull critical scrutiny.

As AI becomes more normalized, we risk trading one oversimplified narrative for another, from AI as an existential threat to AI as a friendly helper. The Super Bowl ads, with their ornate spectacle and corporate spin, can obscure deeper public needs, like transparency about how AI affects jobs, privacy, decision-making and power.

The Super Bowl is not just about football. It is a cultural mirror. What brands choose to sell and how they choose to sell it tell us more about public sentiment than any poll or viral tweet.

The Super Bowl’s AI moment reflects more than just a marketing strategy. It reflects where we are culturally. We have moved past defining AI and into living with it. That is a milestone. But like most milestones, it comes with tension. Tension between hype and reality, convenience and consequence, novelty and nuance.

The fact that many audience reactions to AI ads this year were critical or skeptical, calling some ads cheap, lazy or eerie, shows that the public is not blindly enthusiastic. (6)

This new rhetoric around AI should reflect this balance between understanding and caution. AI’s role in society is not just as a friend or an enemy. It is a partner shaping the future, a tool that can create and entertain, but also one that we must navigate with wisdom, ethics and real human purpose.

Super Bowl ads may be the funhouse mirror of commercial culture, but they show something real. We are no longer afraid of AI. Not entirely. Now we are figuring out what that means.

Shruthika Gopinath is a sophomore majoring in economics. 

Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.