To close out a year saturated with talk of artificial intelligence’s world-changing implications, Wunder put the notion that “we’ll all be replaced” to the test by producing a video made entirely with AI tools.

The Halifax-based agency released “The Train” this month, a video prompted to emulate some of the most nostalgic, emotional and memorable holiday advertisements of recent times. Wunder’s AI stack was fed a selection including Apple’s “Misunderstood,” Amazon’s “Joy Ride” and the full catalogue of holiday ads from U.K. department store John Lewis & Partners, an annual December tradition in Britain since they began airing in the late 2000s.

What emerged on the other end resembles the familiar, soft-focused hallmarks of a classic big-budget Christmas commercial. But as the film progresses, the qualities that have caused so much industry angst and anxiety begin to surface before culminating in an uncanny conclusion.

“I think we identified going into the holidays that AI is the most buzzworthy thing everyone’s talking about,” says Wunder creative director Stephen Flynn. “You can feel a bit of tension from anyone in the industry. So we wanted to come out and remind people that we’re all big idea people and we know what we bring to a project, and kind of put a little wind in their sails.”

“The Train” opens on a snow-swept home, moving inside as a man in his 30s unwraps a toy train set beneath his Christmas tree. When it fails, he calls his “dad,” who, unable to find a replacement, spends the night tinkering in his workshop. The next morning, the is train working again under the Christmas tree, but the film veers sharply into the uncanny with grotesquely exaggerated closing images of the son’s emotional reaction.

To get “The Train” to its flawed finished product, was no small feat, Flynn tells strategy.

He says the Wunder team spent roughly week’s worth of downtime using prompts to develop a script, storyboards and casting. While AI was able to produce a working script quickly, Flynn says a team of humans was necessary to keep the process on the rails, with continuity emerging as a key snag in the production process. Mike Postma, a Wunder creative director and tech lead on the project, “was computer engineering the heck out of it” to keep settings, wardrobes, character likenesses and the overall tone consistent, Flynn says. And the agency’s hypothesis that the tech would fail in portraying subtle emotion was also validated emphatically in the film’s final moments.

A separate blooper reel released filled with outtakes ranging from incoherent and humorous to disconcerting, more closely reflects the output that Wunder received during production.

“The bloopers are probably 80% to 85% of what you’re getting back. What you’re seeing in the real spot is a singular take,” Flynn says. “It takes a lot to get something usable.”

That friction was partly the point. Wunder approached the project as a creative experiment to test the gap between AI’s perceived capabilities and its practical limitations in a creative context.

“It was an excuse for us as an agency that doesn’t delve into a big AI strategy to see what it’s all about and put it towards something that was humorous and creative,” Flynn says.

While Flynn acknowledges AI’s growing utility, particularly for producing surreal visuals or adding a budget-friendly layer of VFX to in-camera productions, he ultimately sees its role as an additive tool rather than a replacement.

Released after Coca-Cola received criticism for its latest AI-assisted holiday campaign, which carried the tagline of “Real Magic,” “The Train” ends with a response message: “Real magic requires real people.” For Flynn, the line isn’t so much anti-technology as it is a reminder of where his agency believes creative value still resides.

“The crux of our business has always been that it’s a group of humans that have an eye or an ear or a keen ability to select,” Flynn says. “I think it doesn’t matter how much the technology progresses, you’re still always going to need some sort of human vetting to decide what to proceed with.”