Anthropic is understood for its inventive advertising and marketing, however the AI firm could have been a bit bit too inventive when it conjured up its most up-to-date commercial.
Titled “There’s hope in onerous questions,” the corporate’s newest advert has been unsettling viewers with its bizarre imagery and doomer-ist tone.
The advert begins with a video of a burning home (not precisely a heartwarming begin) earlier than pivoting to a collection of nonetheless pictures. These pictures embody a crowd of individuals being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless individual sleeping on the road, rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what seems to be a bunch of laborers toiling in a mine the place (presumably) uncooked supplies for smartphones are being dug up.
In the meantime, a voice-over monitor options totally different individuals asking questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we have to?”
Briefly: Not precisely the family-friendly crowd-pleaser of the 12 months. On the similar time, it’s additionally not notably far afield from the corporate’s previous messaging. Anthropic has constantly tried to depict itself as the moral foil to different AI corporations. This newest advertising and marketing stunt — which leans into criticism of AI as a strategy to make Anthropic appear conscious of (and due to this fact distinctly worthy of) the accountability it carries — would look like extra of the identical.
Not all people is having it, nonetheless.
Sam Altman — the CEO of OpenAI, Anthropic’s chief rival — kicked off the criticism with some pithy trolling. “i believed this was satire, stored on the lookout for the deal with to be spelled c1audeai or one thing,” Altman posted to X on Monday.
Different skeptics — a lot of whom appear to work within the tech business — got here out of the woodwork to comment upon Anthropic’s odd selection of images and tone.
“Anthropic is kind of an incredible firm. With the worst company communications ever,” another person said.
“[T]he EAs [effective altruists] at anthropic actually have to be dwelling in a bubble of ai psychosis to assume this might go down properly,” a vital poster remarked.
As some have pointed out, Anthropic is following a really time-tested advertising and marketing playbook right here. That playbook includes a model calling out and proudly owning the harms brought on by its business as a strategy to exhibit that it’s the firm greatest positioned to keep away from or appropriate these harms.
However even when it’s a well-known playbook, it appears to have backfired right here — notably the choice to incorporate a quick shot that seems to be from Arlington Nationwide Cemetery. “I can’t stress sufficient how fucked up it’s that Anthropic is working an advert that features this picture asking ‘Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we have to?’” mentioned one commenter, sharing the cemetery picture that seems within the advert.
Individuals stored coming again to the graveyard imagery. “Out of all the things in that advert, this half was exceptionally bizarre and sinister,” another person wrote, sharing the identical picture.
Personally, the advert vaguely jogs my memory of the propaganda sequence in “The Parallax View” — the Seventies paranoid thriller about an evil company concerned in an MK-Extremely-esque conspiracy to create brainwashed assassins. That is in all probability not the perfect affiliation to have for an organization that want to show it’s performing as a pressure for good on the earth.
Anthropic’s advertising and marketing has made a splash earlier than. In February, throughout the Tremendous Bowl, the corporate unleashed a slew of ads that humorously took goal at OpenAI’s resolution to include ads in ChatGPT. These adverts earned it a good amount of positive buzz — in addition to the smoldering rage of its competitor.
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