Wireless meets water in Cellphone Bill, a horror-comedy campaign from Boost Mobile and Liquid Death that turns telecom pain points into something watchably weird.

At the centre: a deranged villain named Cellphone Bill, played by Tony Cavalero, who haunts families while whispering about hidden fees, fine print and long-term contracts. He’s telecom hell personified and, naturally, he drinks Liquid Death while dishing out the torment.

Created by Liquid Death’s in-house studio, Death Machine, the campaign dropped two hero spots and pushed across social, digital and CellphoneBill.com. There, viewers could escape Bill’s wrath by switching to Boost Mobile’s $25/month Unlimited Plan with a ‘forever’ price guarantee.

It shouldn’t work. It does.

Read the Campaign of the Week here. Contagious.

The Guardian warns we’re handing off too much to the likes of ChatGPT. LiveScience says people score lower on thinking tests when AI helps. A WSJ columnist clickbaits that it ‘made me stupid’.

And that’s just the intellectual panic. The emotional panic’s here too. Actors are throwing tantrums over an AI ‘star’ – someone who hasn’t even been in a film yet. Then the real stuff. Zelda Williams – actor, director, and Robin Williams’ daughter – tore into the AI grief-peddlers with one of the sharpest lines in this whole debate,  calling their work ‘over-processed hotdogs made out of the lives of human beings… shoved down someone else’s throat hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up’. She likened it to the ‘Human Centipede of content’, recycled, regurgitated and sold as ‘the future’. It’s a brutal, necessary line aimed squarely at the worst of it: fakery, exploitation, digital necromancy.

But most of the panic around AI isn’t about the sacred. It’s about the shallow. It’s not legacy or memory they’re mourning. It’s status. Process. The illusion of importance.

I can dismiss artistic effort with one word: Avatar. Fifteen years in a blue jungle. Painstaking. Immaculate. Tin-eared and empty. (But then again, so are the self-indulgent tone poems of prestige cinema.)

This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about status. Effort becomes the product.

AI fakes the effort, does it faster, cue the pearl-clutching. Not because it threatens the work, but because it shows how little was there to begin with. AI didn’t make your notes, decks or copy shallow. They already were. The threat isn’t that AI does the boring work. The threat is you no longer have that excuse.

So now what? If the filler’s gone, what are you actually here to do? I’ll save myself the effort (and gently erode my cognitive function) and recommend the same as my esteemed colleague above: pivot to brilliance, maybe?

Adam Richmond, Managing Editor