AI Company’s Billboards Say Workers Are Disposable. But Are We?

The ads started popping up in San Francisco in October last year: ‘STOP HIRING HUMANS.’ The company, named Artisan, had a series of other display ads throughout the city, with similarly provocative messaging: ‘Artisans Won’t Need a Meeting With HR,’ ‘Artisans Won't Complain About Work-Life Balance,’ and, more explicitly, ‘Hire Artisans, not humans.’

One billboard on the 101 featured the cheeky variant ‘STOP HIRRING [sic] HUMANS’, with the HIRRING underlined in red squiggles to suggest a mistake of the sort that only humans, those inherently error-prone creatures, might make. ‘Hire Ava, the AI BDR,’ went the next line, with an uncanny graphic depicting a virtual female face with lasers shooting out of her eyes. (BDR, in this case, means Business Development Representative, which is a junior sales role you’d typically hire a person for – at least until the advent of Ava.)

Garish, inflammatory, annoying? Absolutely. Effective? Also, unfortunately, yes. The ad campaign generated write-ups in local news outlets like SFGate and the Chronicle, as well as in tech industry publications like Gizmodo, leading to a surge of publicity for the company. Speaking to SFGate, Artisan’s CEO defended the campaign as a viral marketing tactic: "We wanted something that would draw eyes — you don’t draw eyes with boring messaging." Instead, they went the sinister route, basing their entire campaign on the threat of mass labor displacement. It seems to have worked: earlier this year, the CEO claimed in a blog post that the marketing campaign led to two million dollars in annual recurring revenue. They’ve also raised another twenty-five million since the first campaign, bringing their total raised to thirty-seven million. Turns out being openly contemptuous of the general public is very lucrative.

The general public’s response to the campaign has been mostly negative. The blog post catalogs some of the death threats as a result of the campaign. Most seem more jokey than serious; one highlights the need for a ‘Mario’, since Luigi is ‘busy.’ The CEO also hosted a Reddit AMA last December, with poor results: the comments are littered with insults, describing him as a ‘poster child of a dystopic future,’ a ‘professional parasite,’ and a ‘villain.’

Maybe the company has learned something from that experience. In the last few weeks, Artisan has re-emerged with a new marketing campaign, but this one is softer, less brash. This one has asterisks. ‘Stop Hiring Humans … *For Work They Hate’. ‘Stop Hiring Humans ... *To Write Cold Emails’. ‘Stop Hiring Humans ... *To Do Manual Outbound.’ Ava, the virtual woman, is still shown, but her eyes no longer have lasers.

Why this retreat? Perhaps the company sees the dangers of marketing a product explicitly as a weapon against the working class. Could it be that the CEO really is afraid of getting “Luigi'd”? After all, we’re in a moment of increasing AI backlash — there is growing understanding that this technology will cause mass unemployment. And the original ad campaign did not shy away from that narrative.

In a country with minimal safety net, an advertising campaign promising to replace humans with ‘AI Employees,’ even if meant partly as a joke, is not whimsical or harmless. It is instead a threat. And the backlash shows that it was received that way. That helps explain a new framing designed to appease the humans it formerly claimed to make obsolete: Don’t worry, we’re not taking your job away; we’re actually helping you!

Strangely, the result is a somewhat more honest marketing campaign. The original billboards made it seem like Artisan sells all-purpose, drop-in AI replacements for human employees, which, to be clear, they absolutely do not. I cannot stress enough just how disappointing the actual technology is, in comparison. In addition to the crime of poor taste, Artisan’s marketing team is also guilty of deceptive advertising. It makes you wonder what the FTC has been up to.

In this current moment of frenzied AI hype, where investors and executives are driven by FOMO to adopt something AI-related as soon as possible, a memorable billboard campaign goes a long way.

What these so-called ‘AI Employees’, or ‘Artisans’, actually do is disappointingly banal. In Artisan’s own words, their product helps you ‘automate your outbound,’ in the sense of outbound sales. Essentially, their product helps you to find potential customers and then send them cold emails or LinkedIn messages. That’s pretty much it. General-purpose AI ‘employees’ may be their eventual goal — in an interview with VentureBeat, the company suggested plans to expand to marketing and customer support — but for now, Artisan is purely a business-to-business sales tool.

In other words: Far from being some terrifying AI replacement for humans full stop, Artisan is merely another software tool to automate spamming, one which 'occasionally' hallucinates. Not exactly groundbreaking technology; sales automation has been a well-funded investment category for years. Artisan’s most important innovation comes not from their technical team but their marketing department, which, to its credit, has achieved the difficult task of standing out in a city saturated with B2B slop. Any other AI company could have adopted the ‘AI Employee’ tagline, but Artisan got there first, even if their claims are spurious. In this current moment of frenzied AI hype, where investors and executives are driven by FOMO to adopt something AI-related as soon as possible, a memorable billboard campaign goes a long way. With enough investment, Artisan could eventually create products that sort of substantiate its marketing claims. The billboards could manifest reality, if seen by enough credulous investors.

Recent history shows that corporations are always looking to cut down labor costs, even at the expense of product or service quality, as long as it makes shareholders happy.

Whether or not Artisan specifically succeeds in making these ‘AI Employees,’ the threat of ‘AI employees,’ in the broad sense, is real. These billboards speak to a broader narrative of the tantalizing potential of AI as a powerful weapon for the wealthy in their pursuit of neverending profits. Its power is twofold: it can be deployed quickly and cheaply, and it’s so shrouded in technical mystique that the average person feels like they can’t even begin to understand it. As a result, it serves as a useful tool for management to discipline and punish workers, the workers who complain to HR, who seek work-life balance, who want any money at all. Workers: what a nuisance! So demanding, and yet so error-prone.

AI, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be perfect, precisely because it’s so undemanding. As a weapon, AI doesn’t have to be that good to be lethal; it just has to be good enough. It’s okay if the chatbot occasionally hallucinates, if it’s cheaper than hiring a person. Recent history shows that corporations are always looking to cut down labor costs, even at the expense of product or service quality, as long as it makes shareholders happy. Like outsourcing in the 70s and 80s, AI is the 21st century weapon of choice for the corporate class, functioning as an alibi for cutting labor costs without scaring shareholders. You’re not downsizing, you’re becoming more efficient. You’re bringing your company into the future. And who can argue with progress?

What’s frustrating about this framing is the implication that the technology represents some sort of linear progression of human technological evolution. First there was fire, then the wheel, then, finally, our dear friend Ava, the AI BDR. But there’s no need to passively accept this framing. If the backlash signals anything, it is that people will not allow their communities to get steamrolled by technology that only benefits the wealthy. There is a long and storied history of resistance to technology being foisted upon workers, and we can draw from that history to find inspiration in the current moment. The Luddites, for example, rose up in response to the introduction of machinery that would render their labor obsolete. Despite popular misconceptions, their struggle did not emerge from an irrational fear of new technology in the abstract. Rather, their resistance was a grimly rational response to a technology that would only be used to hurt them.

The Luddites may have failed, but their motivations remain as relevant as ever. There’s no need to be afraid of Ava, or whatever other creepy anthropomorphized AI shows up on tomorrow’s billboards. Ava is just a widget with an anime face; it’s not a worthy nemesis. The real enemy is all around us: corporations that show only contempt for working people and their desire for a life worth living.