In HallPass’ product shot, sugar is “suger,” and package is “pacaage.”
The lower-calorie candy company comes from some big names in food. Its cofounders are Peter Rahal, the cofounder of David Protein and RxBar, and Michael Tierney, the founder of Stuffed Puffs. It also operates under Medici Brands, David Protein’s parent company.
And yet, its Monday launch was full of AI flubs.
Much of the text is a blurred garble of letters. Take the words under “peanut creme crispy waters” (they were going for “wafers”). They’re completely incoherent, a classic example of AI image generators’ well-documented struggle to replicate text.
Or there’s the “…Have Fun” above the logo. The middle bar has an extra dot in the ellipsis. The bottom bar swaps an H for an N.
Other images show this says “enlarged for detail.” But does it really look like that?
Eagle-eyed viewers called out the typos online. Casey Lewis, author of the After School newsletter, said that “copy editors have never been more important” in the age of AI.
Two days after the launch, Tierney told Business Insider that the flubs were intentional. HallPass had individual images of the three bars, he said, but none of them together. In Tierney’s telling, they used AI to combine the images, and immediately saw the issues.
“We left them there for a little bit of internet rage bait,” he said. “It’s worked.”
Tierney pointed to the product’s name, HallPass. The AI flubs were another nod to the fact that “this is a fun brand,” he said.
Brands using AI in their advertising has proven risky and prone to backlash. REI was roasted for its AI use after an ad showed two sets of bicycle handlebars. A bagel shop owner told Business Insider how using AI in his Instagram posts tanked his Google reviews.
AI pessimism is on the rise, and some commenters online took HallPass’ typos as an offense. Tierney said he wasn’t worried; he said that he was trying to drive some “top-of-funnel awareness” for the launch.
HallPass candies will launch in Walmart stores across the US on August 29. Tierney promises there won’t be any typos on those bars.
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