Beyond Provocative: How One AI Company’s Ad Campaign Betrays Humanity

I was in London last week with my family and spotted this ad in a Tube car. With the headline “Humans Were the Beta Test,” this is for Artisan, a San Francisco-based startup peddling AI-powered “digital workers.” Specifically an AI agent that will perform sales outreach to prospects, etc.

I’ve long left the Bay Area, but I know that the 101 highway is littered with cryptic billboards from tech companies, where the copy only makes sense to people in the tech industry, which to be fair, is a large part of the Bay Area economy. Artisan is infamous for its “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign which went up late last year. Being based in San Diego, much further south in California, I had no idea. Artisan wasn’t even on my radar.

There’s something to be said about shockvertising. It’s meant to be shocking or offensive to grab attention. And the company sure increased their brand awareness, claiming a +197% increase in brand search growth. Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack writes a post-mortem in their company blog about the campaign:

The impact exceeded our wildest expectations. When I meet new people in San Francisco, 70% of the time they know about Artisan and what we do. Before, that number was around 5%. aHrefs ranked us #2 fastest growing AI companies by brand search. We’ve seen 1000s of sales meetings getting booked. 

According to him, “October and November became our biggest months ever, bringing in over $2M in new ARR.”

I don’t know how I feel about this. My initial reaction to seeing “Humans Were the Beta Test” in London was disgust. As my readers know, I’m very much pro-AI, but I’m also very pro-human. Calling humanity a beta test is simply tone-deaf and nihilistic. It is belittling our worth and betting on the end of our species. Yes, yes, I know it’s just advertising and some ads are simply offensive to various people for a variety of reasons. But as technology people, Artisan should know better.

Despite ChatGPT’s soaring popularity, there is still ample fear about AI, especially around job displacement and safety. The discourse around AI is already too hyped up.

I even think “Stop Hiring Humans” is slightly less offensive. As to why the company chose to create a rage-bait campaign, Carmichael-Jack says:

We knew that if we made the billboards as vanilla as everybody else’s, nobody would care. We’d spend $100s of thousands and get nothing in return.

We spent days brainstorming the campaign messaging. We wanted to draw eyes and spark interest, we wanted to cause intrigue with our target market while driving a bit of rage with the wider public. The messaging we came up with was simple but provocative: “Stop Hiring Humans.” 

When the full campaign which included 50 bus shelter posters went up, death threats started pouring in. He was in Miami on business and thought going home to San Francisco might be risky. “I was like, I’m not going back to SF,” Carmichael-Jack says in a quote to The San Francisco Standard. “I will get murdered if I go back.”

(For the record, I’m morally opposed to death threats. They’re cowardly and incredibly scary for the recipient, regardless of who that person is.)

I’ve done plenty of B2B advertising campaigns in my day. Shock is not a tactic I would have used, nor would I ever recommend to a brand trying to raise positive awareness. I wish Artisan would have used the services of a good B2B ad agency. There are plenty out there and I used to work at one.

Think about the brands that have used shockvertising tactics in the past like Benetton and Calvin Klein. I’ve liked Oliviero Toscani’s controversial photographs that have been the central part of Benetton’s campaigns because they instigate a positive liberal conversation. The Pope kissing Egypt’s Islamic leader invites dialogue about religious differences and coexistence and provocatively expresses the campaign concept of “Unhate.”

But Calvin Klein’s sexualized high schoolers? No. There’s no good message in that.

And for me, there’s no good message in promoting the death of the human race. After all, who will pay for the service after we’re all end-of-lifed?