Why the adverts trolling us about AI stealing our jobs hit too close to home
I was standing waiting for the Tube when I looked up and saw it – the sentence that would instantly spike my cortisol levels and ruin my day.
“Stop hiring humans,” read the words, all in caps, plastered onto the wall of the Northern line. And below that: “The Era of AI Employees Is Here.”
At first I thought it must be a joke, albeit one in very poor taste. Or maybe it was one of those viral bits of activism – designed to get onlookers all riled up, only to find upon googling that it was all part of a clever campaign protesting against the onslaught of AI. Yes, that must be it. For surely nobody would be so stupid, so crass, as to design an advert counselling against employing people – especially when its audience would be comprised solely of grumpy commuters. Specifically, grumpy human commuters.
I tried to shake off my initial kneejerk fury as I stepped aboard the incoming train, only to be confronted with yet another, smaller advert. This one had a picture of a woman’s face – an AI woman, not a real one, going by her poreless skin and violet eyes – with a zero-star rating next to it and the quote, “Ava took my job and did it better.” It had the same brand name as the bigger ad underneath: Artisan. This one didn’t feel very… activism-y. It felt like a straight-up advert – one taken directly from the pages of a dystopian novel.
When I was above ground with internet access, I quickly discovered that, no, the ad was not a joke, nor was it a viral protest. It was, indeed, touting the services of Artisan AI, a Silicon Valley-based startup founded by British entrepreneur Jaspar Carmichael-Jack in 2023. After receiving more than $21m in accelerator funding, the company had been developing “artisans” (with, apparently, no sense of irony about using a word that denotes a worker in a highly skilled trade as the name of their business). These “artisans” are described as being human-like digital workers that automate workflows, rather than being simply software tools designed for humans to use. Wait a second: didn’t we all get sold the dream that AI was going to make our lives better, helping us with our jobs rather than wholesale pilfering them?
I wasn’t the only one for whom the message had prompted a wave of repulsion and disgust. Plenty of others were sharing their horror online, including Vasco Vaz Rodrigues, head of growth at anti-fraud network Trudenty. “What in the Black Mirror episode is this?” he wrote in a LinkedIn post. “How tone deaf is this campaign when people are already struggling so much?”
Meanwhile, Abid Tejani, senior account executive at analytics firm Primetag, called the ad “triggering” and labelled it “emotional manipulation”.
Our collective ire was no accident. The whole campaign had been designed to be “provocative”, according to Carmichael-Jack. Well, more than provocative – he described it as “rage-bait” in an interview with SFGate after first running the ads in San Francisco late last year.
“They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI,” he originally said in 2024. “The way the world works is changing … we wanted something that would draw eyes – you don’t draw eyes with boring messaging.”
And, in a way, he’s right. In a world packed to the gills with advertising, with someone trying to sell you something every time you unlock your phone, open your laptop, switch on your TV or simply leave your house, cutting through the noise is preposterously difficult. Yet those three words on a simple purple background – “Stop hiring humans” – were powerful enough for me to sit up and take notice. Not only that, they caused a physical reaction: my stomach flipped over in anxiety; my fist tightened in anger; my mouth involuntarily turned down in profound distaste. You wanted my attention? Mission accomplished.
But despite intentionally courting controversy, even Carmichael-Jack was taken aback by the ferocity of indignation he sparked.
Underestimating the strength of feeling, the 23-year-old CEO posted an “ask me anything” subreddit titled “I’m CEO of Artisan, the company behind the ‘Stop Hiring Humans’ billboards” in December. The responses range from angry to very angry to exceptionally angry indeed.
Ads like Artisan’s are preying on the most rational fear we have
In San Francisco, where ads also included wantonly inflammatory taglines such as “Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance” and “Artisans are excited to work 70+ hours a week”, the company received hundreds of death threats and hate mail.
“We never expected the level of backlash we ended up seeing,” admitted Carmichael-Jack – somehow surprised that a campaign designed with the express purpose of pissing people off had done precisely that. And then the inevitable U-turn later on: “We don’t actually want people to stop hiring humans and I don’t actually think AI is dystopian. The real goal for us is to automate the work that humans don’t enjoy, and to make every job more human.”
The problem is, the ads are next-level trolling because they are so on the nose, the so-called joke a very likely result of this unchecked AI arms race.
According to data released this week, reports The Times, the number of new entry-level jobs – such as graduate roles, apprenticeships, internships and junior positions with no degree requirement – has fallen by nearly a third since the launch of AI tool ChatGPT in November 2022. Young people are entering an already competitive job market, only to find that their jobs have been stolen by a large language model.
Companies, meanwhile, have publicly stated their intentions to replace human employees with AI tools in the coming years; BT, for example, announced in 2023 that it expected 10,000 jobs to be lost to artificial intelligence by the end of this decade.
The creative industries are already under siege. AI tools are taking over the advertising industry, while copywriting, photography, graphic design and basic journalism are all firmly in the firing line. A 2024 Pew Research Center report estimated that 30 per cent of media jobs could be automated by 2035; a 2023 report by Goldman Sachs predicted that AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million jobs in total. It’s a looming existential threat – one that, without proper thought, legislation and intervention, which currently looks to be in chronically short supply, could quite literally change the fabric of society as we know it.
Ads like Artisan’s are preying on the most rational fear we have. What’s more, this fear-mongering has reportedly played right into their hands, resulting in the generation of more than a billion online impressions and $2m in new annually recurring income, all within two months of the campaign running in the US. Clearly, rage-baiting pays.
I just hope marketing like this and the consternation it provokes are enough to radicalise us. We need our governments to finally sit up, take notice – and stop sleepwalking into a world in which millions of us are unemployed and on the dole, all because “Ava took our jobs and did them better”.
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