San Francisco is plastered with billboards advertising AI tech, all in varying degrees of in-your-face dystopic. Even so, a new crop of them has managed to stand out from the pack by being shockingly upfront about the industry’s attitude toward regular humans.
“Our AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her,” reads a billboard asking you to visit a website called Replacement.AI. “Don’t worry, it’s totally legal [winking emoji].”
Visiting the website finds an even more overt message: huge text proclaiming that humans are “no longer necessary.”
“Stupid. Smelly. Squishy. It’s time for a machine solution,” it reads. “At Replacement.AI, we believe that building AI tools to fix the world’s most pressing challenges is an unprofitable waste of time.”
There’s also an actual quote by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”
Before you get your pitchforks out: it’s satire. The ad was highlighted in a now-viral tweet by makeup artist and influencer Matt Bernstein, before being reshared across the internet in places like Reddit, where the joke was lost on many users.
To be fair, we can’t blame them. The shtick is only slightly more outrageous than billboards for actual AI startups that have been plaguing Silicon Valley, like the “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign, which was obviously designed to stir up controversy, as are many others. Angering Luddites or generally just ticking you off is the name of the game.
It’s a young industry, and apparently so are the people running its marketing. These AI startups may be competitors, but they’re all in on an internet-poisoned inside joke together, which the regular Joes that they’re ostensibly advertising to are not.
Enter Replacement.AI, which parodies the universal irreverence of the San Francisco AI bro, not to mention touching on how many tech CEOs have openly bragged about replacing their workers with AI (often unsuccessfully).
“We’re not going to bulls**t you about superhuman AI ’empowering workers,’” reads its website. “We’re explicitly building machines that are going to be better than you at every task.”
One of its pages is dedicated to the human artists threatened by AI.
“To the Artists replaced by AI – thank you,” it says, above a video message from one of the company’s purported representatives. The page also has a real quote from OpenAI that the company submitted to the UK government: “It would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”
Clearly, a lot of effort went into pulling this off. And money: another user spotted several Replacement.AI billboards in Times Square. It also has a “CEO” named Dan, with his own Twitter profile and accompanying smug video message.
Overall, it’s a fun riposte at the people spearheading our ridiculous AI age, but with news like Amazon secretly planning to replace over half a million jobs at its warehouses with an army of robots, perhaps it won’t be just a joke for much longer.
Replacement.AI has a solution for that future: a form where you can “Beg for a place in our bunker.”
“Just record a video explaining why you agree that humans deserve replacing, and why you deserve a space,” it reads, “and we’ll maybe consider thinking about letting you in.”
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