Under Armour's AI Sports Ad Was Built on Work Nobody Credited
What happened
When ad director Des Walker announced on Instagram in March 2024 that he had created the "first AI-powered sports commercial" in three weeks flat, the claim landed as a feat. The ad featured boxer Anthony Joshua in a campaign for Under Armour, blending AI video, AI photography, 3D CGI, 2D VFX, motion graphics, 35mm film, and AI voiceover. Walker framed the production as a demonstration of what a small crew and modern tools could deliver faster and cheaper than conventional methods.
The announcement drew scrutiny almost immediately. Other creatives noted that the ad did not just echo earlier work: it closely repackaged a commercial made two years before by directors Gustav Johansson and Andre Chementoff. Neither was named anywhere in the campaign, not in Walker's announcement and not in Under Armour's rollout. The AI framing had directed attention toward the speed of production and away from the question of whose ideas the production was built on.
Walker's response was that Under Armour and production company 72 and Sunny held the rights to the footage and had officially requested and licensed its use. That addressed the legal question. It did not address the professional one. Acknowledging the directors whose work formed the commercial's foundation is a norm the industry had long treated as baseline conduct, regardless of what a license permits. The "AI-powered" label gave the work a veneer of novelty that made the repackaging less visible until others pointed it out.
The reaction from the creative community ran wider than this one ad. Filmmakers and designers used the incident to name something they had been watching develop across many projects: AI tools can compress production timelines, but they can also obscure how much of a final product came from prior human work. Walker's three-week efficiency story was accurate. The originality story required considerably more scrutiny.
The incident points to a gap that has no clean fix yet. When a production draws on licensed material, mixes in generated elements, and presents the result as a new work, there is rarely a clear record tracing what each component was, where it came from, and who made the choices. A provable record of what a system produced and what it incorporated, step by step, would have surfaced those dependencies before the ad went public rather than after the creative community noticed. Without that, "AI-powered" can function as a claim that deflects questions rather than answers them.
Reported impact
- Affected parties
- Not publicly disclosed
- Harm type
- Not publicly disclosed
- Scale
- Not publicly disclosed
- Financial impact
- Not publicly disclosed
- Regulatory action
- Not publicly disclosed
Classification
Relevant governance controls
Governance control mapping is not available for this record.
- No controls mapped
Not publicly disclosed
Control mapping is analytical. It does not state that any control would have prevented the incident.
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index. The event is also catalogued in the following database, which is listed for cross-reference.