Anti-human AI 'rage-bait' billboards want to provoke us
Ads for a Y-Combinator AI startup have been plastered around San Francisco, promising that yet another dumb, useless AI chat bot "Won't Complain About Work-Life Balance". The billboards and ads, spread around the general dystopia of San Francisco's already unconscionable wealth divide, promise that "The Era of AI Employees Is Here".
An official blog post, shared by the company after the marketing blitz, plays victim - despite claiming the ads are intentionally meant to be provocative.
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."
We complimented our core tagline with phrases like "Artisans Won't Complain About Work-Life Balance", “Humans Are So 2023”, “Artisans Won’t Come Into Work Hungover”, “Hire Artisans, Not Humans” and "The era of AI employees is here”, paired with the human appearance of our AI SDR, Ava.
The victomhood comes when the company claims "we didn’t expect people to get so mad" and that "the goal of the campaign was always to rage bait, but we never expected the level of backlash we ended up seeing." No shit.
The company also claims "the timing was unideal - to say the least" referencing the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson - and the general class-conscious backlash towards the most vicious American capitalists and companies.
According to a January story from the ABC's 7:30:
"A recent study by Deloitte's Global Economist Network found that in just two years, between 2019 and 2021, the net worth of America's top 1 per cent of earners went up by a staggering 23 per cent.
According to analysis of pay scales by the Economic Policy institute, in 1965 the ratio of pay between a typical CEO and a worker was 20-1. By 2018, the ratio was 278-1.
The gap has continued to rise.
But don't worry - the company is now wasting human time by reporting threats of violence surrounding an intentionally provocative, dehumanising advertising campaign. It claims "While all of them will be reported to the FBI, some of them were actually pretty funny."
If 2024 will be remembered for anything, it'll be remembered for the mask-off moment we're experienceing, particularly in America but spreading around the world and definitely here in Australia.
Big tech hates humanity. It steals from it, it regurgitates the best of it in the worst ways, and then it turns around and intentionally prods its users, with billboards surrounded by homeless people, promising to give the world even more income inequality.
While it is somewhat unrelated, the rage-bait this startup describes is a byproduct of social media. What was once seen as a simple place to share photos and thoughts, social media is filled with rage-bait, designed to upset you and not improve your life at all. Algorithms on Reddit, X, Instagram, Facebook and countless other apps are designed to show you things that upset you, including deceptive AI-generated images and text.
And enough is never enough. Not only is every Meta feed on Threads, Facebook and Instagram now designed to show you provocative content, it's going to get worse. In October Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that more AI slop was coming.
“I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” the Meta CEO said. “And I think that that’s gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time.”
In an Australian context, a better approach to social media reform would be some kind of legislation around 'For You' feeds and algorithms, controlled by the most wealthy, anger-anticipating social media brands in the world. But instead VPNs will get around intentionally substance-devoid legislation. The best way to spread cyber-bullying content online is through an algorithm that feeds off controversy and engagement. Maybe we should force companies to let us see content that we want to see by default, instead of having feeds shoved down our throats. But I know already that this is a naive take and that the social-media legislation in Australia doesn't intent to fix any real problems.
There's nothing anyone can individually do about this kind of tech-bro moment. I've hidden the name of the startup that launched these provocative billboards, but I know that it honestly doesn't matter. Our phones, computers and feeds are now home to the desires of billionares abroad. And we're only going to see more desperate, goading attempts from AI companies to stay relevant as the entire bubble flames out.
