"Stop hiring humans": Y-Combinator-backed firm's controversial billboard lobbying its 'Era of AI employees is here' ad campaign enrages Silicon Valley

• A recent billboard lauds the replacement of humans with AI employees.
• The ad campaign claims "Artisans won't complain about work-life balance."
• The company's CEO admits the ad was designed to draw attention.

The generative AI wave has redefined the world across all sectors. The job market, in particular, has been greatly impacted by the ever-evolving technology. In 2022, Microsoft's Work Trend Index report indicated that the majority of the study participants indicated they were too tired and didn't have enough time to do their work, but AI could help. However, 49% of the polled participants expressed concern that AI could affect their job security.

This year's report suggested that AI has broadly been adopted in the job market. Most company executives are exclusively hiring people with an AI aptitude, prompting "a 142x increase in LinkedIn members adding AI skills like Copilot and ChatGPT to their profiles." Contrary to popular belief that integrating AI into an organization's workflow would lead to job loss, the company executives who participated in the exercise expressed concern over the lack of enough talent to fill vacancies in their organizations.

According to a new ad campaign by an AI startup called Artisan, there might no longer be a need for humans in the workplace. The AI startup has plastered multiple billboards in San Francisco with a controversial tagline — “Stop Hiring Humans” (via GIZMODO).

For context, Artisan is an AI company specializing in the development of software that could dispense services like customer care and sales, potentially claiming jobs from humans.

While speaking to SFGate, Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack explained the company's crude advertising strategy:

“They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI. The way the world works is changing. We wanted something that would draw eyes — you don’t draw eyes with boring messaging.”

Here are some of the messages featured in the company's ad campaign:

• Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance
• Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never ‘not be working’ today
• Hire Artisans, not humans
• The era of AI employees is here

But who's Artisan's target audience? Aside from privacy and security concerns, the loss of jobs to AI is also a major concern among users, especially with the rapid progression of the technology. The main goal of advertising is to sell a product and create more awareness of its existence.

In this specific scenario, humans are Artisans' target audience. However, the product on display might not be well received, as AI is being advertised as the better alternative for employees in the workplace. But at the end of the day, there's no bad publicity — any publicity is good.

Is AI claiming jobs from humans?

While discussing the impact of AI in the job market, former OpenAI CRO Mira Murati indicated:

"Some creative jobs maybe will go away. But maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place — you know, if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality."

Despite claims indicating image generation tools like Copilot and OpenAI's DALL-E 3 technology are lobotomized, reports suggest that AI tools are on the verge of claiming interior design and architecture jobs from professionals due to their capability to generate sophisticated designs in seconds. Interestingly, the same tools can't create a plain white image.

Billionaire Elon Musk predicts a future where AI takes over all jobs, turning work into a hobby. Similarly, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang indicated that we're on the verge of reaching the next wave of AI with self-driving cars and humanoid robots at the forefront. Huang indicated coding might be dead in the water as a career option for the next generation. Instead, he recommends following alternative career paths in biology, education, manufacturing, or farming.

Another report suggests that 54% of banking jobs could be automated using AI. However, it is unclear if these positions can be fully automated using AI amid reports of the development of advanced AI hitting scaling laws due to a lack of high-quality content for training AI models.