The ‘Most Unhinged’ AI-Generated Gambling Ad Ran During the NBA Finals

Self-described “AI Filmmaker” PJ Ace was hired by gambling brand Kalshi to make what he describes as the “most unhinged” commercial possible and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Disney-owned ABC approved it and ran it during the YouTube TV broadcast of game three of the NBA Finals this week.

PJ Ace has successfully created viral, attention-grabbing videos using AI. Earlier this month, he garnered millions of views by asking AI to generate a video that re-imagined Biblical figures as modern-day influencers. Kalshi, a gambling company that allows people to bet on basically anything, hired PJ Ace to make an ad to air during the NBA Finals with a two-day timeline.

“Kalshi hit me up wanting a spot where people placed odds on wild markets during the NBA Finals,” PJ Ace writes on Reddit. “I told them that the best way to use Veo 3 right now is to have crazy people doing crazy things while they highlight your brand. They love GTA VI. I grew up in Florida. This concept kind of wrote itself.”

PJ Ace says the commercial was created using Google’s AI products, namely Gemini and Veo 3.

“I asked their team if they’d put together a few dialogue bits they wanted to include, and I came up with 10 different crazy people in crazy situations for them to say those lines in,” PJ Ace explains. “I co-write with Gemini—asking it to pitch me ideas, then I take the best ones and shape them into a basic script.”

After the script was created, PJ Ace then asked Gemini to convert every shot into a detailed Veo 3 prompt, specifically asking it to return five prompts at a time as a maximum since he says that beyond that, the quality dips noticeably.

PJ Ace says that creating this ad, which surely many viewers didn’t realize was AI-generated, was significantly more affordable than traditional advertising, which appears to be his pitch to brands.

“This took around 300–400 generations to get 15 usable clips. One person, two days. That’s a 95% cost reduction compared to traditional advertising,” he says. He calls AI-generated commercials like this one the future of advertising, as long as what is created is attention-grabbing and comedic.

“Right now the most valuable skill in entertainment and advertising is comedy writing. If you can make people laugh, they’ll watch the full ad, engage with it, and some of them will become customers,” PJ Ace says.

“Just because this was cheap doesn’t mean anyone can do it. I’ve been a director 15+ years. Brands still will need to pay a premium for taste. The future is small teams making viral, brand-adjacent content weekly, getting 80 to 90 percent of the results for way less.”

While PJ Ace did not state exactly how much he was paid for this ad, he says that most of his productions “fall between $10k and $40k,” adding that “it pays way better than I made doing live-action commercials because it’s 10x the volume and I can work in my boxers.”

Update 6/13: Clarification added that the ad was not approved for network television or through locally-owned stations and only ran during the commercial segment of the YouTube TV stream of the game.