There have been concerns over how AI could disrupt human jobs, but a San Francisco startup appears to be taking things up a notch.
Artisan, a San Francisco startup that’s looking to automate outbound sales, has run a provocative marketing campaign urging companies to not hire human workers, and try out their AI tools instead. The campaign has involved the company putting up billboards around San Francisco with messages like “Stop hiring humans”. The message urges users to instead interview Ava, the company’s AI BDR (Business Development Representative).
Another billboard lists out why AI employees should be preferred to humans. “Artisans won’t come into work hungover,” a message says, before declaring that the era of AI employees was here.
Other billboards poke fun at excuses human employees can often make to avoid work. One says that “Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never “Not be working” today.”
The campaign has caught the attention of passersby. Several of the billboards are being shared on social media, and are drawing mixed reactions. Some commentators are saying this is a glimpse of what the future will look like, while others are calling the campaign dystopian and unsettling.
Artisan said that they’d designed the campaign to provoke people, while also get their message across to workers in tech companies. “We don’t actually want people to stop hiring humans – we’re actively hiring across all roles, 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. Nobody wants to spend 8 hours a day researching people and writing outbound emails, so we built Ava to do it for them,” the company said in its blog.
But the campaign has struck a nerve, particularly because it was run in a place like San Francisco. Apart from being the tech capital of the world, San Francisco also has the unenviable reputation of extreme amounts of poverty and drug use. The city’s streets are teeming with homeless individuals, who are often addicted to dangerous drugs. The juxtaposition of such dysfunction alongside futuristic tech like Waymo’s self-driving cars has been discussed at length — San Francisco seems to simultaneously exhibit the soaring successes and terrible failures of human civilization. And a billboard that proudly says “Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance” as a homeless person squats next can make for some poignant — and disturbing — imagery.
