KitKat Canada Tests the Power of AI by Giving It a Much-Needed Break

For 85 years, KitKat has been encouraging humans to “Have A Break.” Now, their world-famous tagline has a new audience: AI. 

Today, AI is tasked with doing just about everything, from generating heartfelt letters to returning thoroughly detailed research results. The world’s fastest growing technology may be built to handle hard work but as KitKat has long known, breaks are good for everyone, even AI.

So, after doing some research, KitKat Canada released a new video on its social platforms where it tested its iconic tagline with today’s AI. The brand teamed with its AOR Courage Inc. for a fun exercise in which the team prompted a generator to “Have A Break” before completing a task. The results were pretty sweet: Asking the AI to “Have A Break, and then…” led to detailed, more accurate responses when compared to the same question without the additional instruction.

The new stunt was inspired by a recent Google DeepMind study on large language model-based AIs, which detailed how prompting “a break” before any request improves the accuracy of the response. Presumably, giving the machine more time to think and refine its answer positively impacted the end result similar to how humans experience improved performances after a much-need breather.

“KitKat’s tagline is one of the most recognized slogans in the world. It reminds us to take a break in our busy lives,” said Joel Hotlby, co-founder and CCO of Courage Inc. “That extra moment can help us do better work, look at problems differently, or simply relax. So, when we found out that AI was better with a break too, naturally we called up KitKat right away.” 

KitKat Canada shared the new video on its owned Instagram account, @kitkatcanada.