The Hidden Cost used ChatGPT to reveal what consumer goods take from wildlife

Everyday products often arrive without any visible sign of the environmental damage connected to their production. A packet of coffee does not show the habitat lost to agriculture, while a smartphone rarely reflects the effect of extracting the materials inside it.

The Hidden Cost made those consequences impossible to overlook. Created by AI designer Nikolaj Lykke Viborg as a self-initiated concept for WWF Denmark, the campaign transformed familiar consumer goods into images of the animals affected by their production.

Consumer products became threatened animals

The campaign consists of 11 print-style visuals, with each one connecting a product category to wildlife and habitat loss.

Cocoa powder forms the face of a gorilla, while other executions pair noodles with a tiger, tuna with a sea turtle, avocados with a macaw and beauty products with an orangutan.

Additional visuals connect smartphones with a rhinoceros, sunscreen with a sea turtle, logging with a harpy eagle, wool with a snow leopard and coffee with a jaguar. Chocolate appears in another execution featuring a gorilla.

Each pairing brings the product and its environmental consequences into the same frame. The animals do not appear beside the products as separate subjects. Instead, the materials and objects become part of their faces, suggesting that wildlife is carrying the cost of human consumption.

The campaign made invisible consequences visible

The title The Hidden Cost refers to what shoppers do not see when choosing products. Price labels explain what an item costs the buyer, but they rarely show what its production may cost forests, oceans and animal habitats.

By placing threatened animals inside recognisable products, the visuals compress a complicated environmental issue into one immediate image. Viewers can understand the central idea without first reading a lengthy explanation.

The approach also avoids presenting consumerism as an abstract problem. Coffee, chocolate, cosmetics, seafood and smartphones are all familiar parts of everyday life. Connecting them to individual animals makes the environmental impact feel closer to the decisions people make.

Eleven visuals were created entirely inside ChatGPT

Viborg developed the campaign as an experiment in AI-assisted advertising. According to the creator, everything from the initial idea to the final images was produced directly in ChatGPT without external design tools or subsequent visual editing.

A carefully developed master prompt helped maintain a consistent emotional and visual language across all 11 executions. The result resembles a complete public-awareness campaign rather than a collection of unrelated AI experiments.

Human direction remained central to the process. The technology generated the copy and imagery, but the campaign depended on Viborg’s concept, product-animal pairings, prompting and creative judgement.

The project therefore presented ChatGPT as a production tool rather than an independent creative author. AI accelerated the journey from idea to finished visual, while the human creator determined the message the work needed to communicate.

The project was self-initiated rather than commissioned

The Hidden Cost was created independently for WWF Denmark and was not presented as an officially commissioned campaign. WWF Denmark later showcased the work through its LinkedIn presence.

That distinction is important because the project operates as both environmental communication and an experiment in emerging creative technology. It demonstrates how a single creator can develop a visually consistent campaign without a conventional photography, illustration or postproduction process.

The environmental message remains the centre of the work. Although the production method attracts attention, the visuals use that technology to expose the connection between consumer demand and disappearing habitats.

The Hidden Cost asks people to look beyond the object they are purchasing. By merging products with the animals affected by their production, the campaign turns an invisible environmental consequence into something that can no longer be separated from the product itself.

Credits

The Hidden Cost, 2025. Self-initiated campaign concept created for WWF Denmark by AI designer Nikolaj Lykke Viborg. Concept, creative direction and prompt development by Nikolaj Lykke Viborg. Copy and visuals generated directly in ChatGPT without external design tools or postproduction. The series consists of 11 campaign visuals and was later showcased by WWF Denmark on LinkedIn.