In San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley, an AI startup called Artisan has spent an untold sum blitzing the city with an advertising campaign that dispenses with the need for humanity. Artisan’s tagline: “Stop Hiring Humans.”
The company, which is backed by startup accelerator Y-Combinator, sells what it calls “AI Employees” or “Artisans.” What the company actually sells is software designed to assist with customer service and sales workflow. The company appears to have done an internal pow-wow and decided that the most effective way to promote its relatively mundane product was to fund an ad campaign heralding the end of the human age.
Writing about the ad campaign, local outlet SFGate notes that the posters—which are strewn all over the city—include plugs like the following:
“Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance”
“Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never ‘not be working’ today.”
“Hire Artisans, not humans.”
“The era of AI employees is here.”
Yes, grim stuff. At first glance, you might wonder who the target audience for these billboards is. After all, the billboards will mostly be viewed by humans, and, as far as can be discerned, most humans enjoy being employed. As such, it’s a media campaign that would seem to discriminate against its core audience. Yet beneath the initial ridiculousness of it all, there is an obvious explanation: the ads are designed to make people mad and, thus, grab headlines.
In an interview with SFGate, the company’s CEO, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, defended his company’s decision to advertise its product by promoting the end of the human labor force. “They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI,” the CEO told the outlet, of the ads. “The way the world works is changing.” He added: “We wanted something that would draw eyes — you don’t draw eyes with boring messaging.”
Yes, Carmichael-Jack was clearly trying to tap into Americans’ outrage over AI—and he has succeeded. I am writing about him, after all. He has effectively banked the predictable outrage that his media campaign was designed to inspire and is now being interviewed by journalists.
Yet, in very much the same way that he is currently using us to promote his company, maybe we can use Carmichael-Jack to make a point. It is Carmichael-Jackson’s admission that his billboards are “dystopian”—just like the product he’s selling—that gets to the heart of what is so fucked up about the whole thing. It’s obvious that Silicon Valley’s code monkeys now embrace a fatalistic bent of history towards the Bladerunner-style hellscape their market imperatives are driving us. They’re through with acting like they’re making the world a better place. If it gets in the way of making money, there’s no point in even pretending.
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