• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, March 14, 2024

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” Pablo Picasso famously said.

Perhaps the most influential artist of the 20^th century, Picasso was expressing a desire to get back to a time when he was about nine, when his color sense and line drawings were free and symbolic, with none of the self-censoring self-consciousness that necessarily affect adult artists.

Getting back to what naturally makes kids’ drawing so glorious is the heart of this new Kraft/Heinz “Lunchables Dunkables” campaign, with creative from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.

The blissfully human and genius theme is “A.I. vs. KI,”  -- that is, kids’ imaginations.

Kids are asked to respond to the prompt “Imagine a mozzarella stick or pretzel twist as something fantastical.”

Not surprisingly, the kids win by a mile. The kids’ drawings are warm and ingenious, especially when contrasted with the cold, weird renderings from AI gremlins.

A video shows the children coming up with wild narratives in otherworldly settings, like “pretzel ninjas fighting peanut butter-spewing dragons.” They also experiment with “pretzel snakes,” “pretzel rockets” and a “mozzarella duck.” 

The Kraft Heinz release maintains that the AI response “couldn’t imagine anything but food,” but I think they’re overselling it.

The AI pictures looked like medical renditions of intestines to me.

The campaign includes video and social media; and the art will also be featured as pop-up exhibitions outside of museums in Los Angeles and Austin.

It’s all linked to a contest to find a Dunkables “Chief  Imagination Officer,” the sort of title that was big at creative ad agencies when they were dealing with explosive changes in technology.  

Starting  this week and through the end of April, parents of interested kids ages 5-13 can submit their children’s responses to the prompt to Dunkables headquarters.  

By May, one super-imaginative artist/junior mogul will be chosen as the aforementioned Chief  Imagination Officer, an honor that comes with a bunch of perks.

The winner will get $1,500 in spending money for a three-night trip to Chicago for three people, with the opportunity to hang for a day at Lunchables’ Headquarters, and create artwork that will be featured in future campaigns.

The newly named  “CIO” will also receive a year’s worth of the boxed snack food, in this case Mozza Sticks with Marinara & Breadcrumbs and Pretzel Twists with PB Spread & Choco Chips.

That’s not a bad haul. Best of all, it puts the idea of fueling kids’ non-digital imaginations into the universe,  and shows that AI is no match for that.

It’s also timely, as AI and “deep fakes” are in the news lately. As the brouhaha over the Kate Middleton family photo showed, the monitoring of images that appear in print and video news is an increasingly huge and threatening problem.

If it took news services like AP and Reuters hours to pick up on the inconsistencies of the Royals’ photo, what would that mean for the far more consequential images coming in from war zones, like Ukraine and Gaza, from unknown photographers?

That’s already happening of course, and very troubling in the wake of staff cutbacks and newspapers worldwide disappearing.

That’s even more reason to bring a little hope and joy into the world by sponsoring a contest to inspire kids to draw.

My beret is off to you for launching this contest, Lunchables Dunkables.  With this sort of recognition, who knows what your chosen Chief Imagination Officer will do in the future? Perhaps become the next Picasso?

And for those who don’t win, there’s always that old faithful: playing with your food.