Staring mindlessly at adverts on the London Underground as your train whizzes from station to station is a common occurrence for commuters in the capital.
But a new advertising campaign which recently arrived on the Tube is getting much more attention – possibly for the wrong reasons.
The posters, found in London Bridge as well as other parts of the network, are suggesting in large letters that businesses should ‘hire artisans, not humans’, adding that ‘the era of AI employees is here’.
Slogans on other posters include ‘Artisans don’t spend half the year on holiday’ or ‘Artisans don’t “WFH” from Ibiza’.
They’re the brainchild of Artisan, an AI company which started in Silicon Valley in 2023 and has since received $25million (£18million) in funding.
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The business aims to build a company powered by AI employees called Artisans – but their advertising campaign has proved controversial, with its CEO facing death threats and hate mail.
‘Stop hiring humans’ posters and billboards first started popping up in San Francisco last December, coinciding with Artisan appearing at TechCrunch Disrupt, an annual tech conference.
It quickly went viral, with an X post about its deliberately misspelt ‘stop hirring humans’ billboard being seen more than 230,000 times.
Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, who’s originally from Surrey, said he and the company had received thousands of death threats since the campaign launched.
After hosting an unofficial ‘ask me anything’ Q&A session on Reddit, he received a swathe of comments, very few of which were positive in any way.
These included one simply saying ‘Oh hi, f*** you’, another asking ‘Why doesn’t the company replace you with AI?’, a third saying ‘How does it feel to be the poster child of a dystopic future?’, and another asking ‘You realise you’re the villain, right?’.
But last month, Jaspar doubled down on the ‘rage-bait’ marketing campaign, despite the thousands of threats he’d received.
He has however since backtracked slightly on his previous message, saying the campaign was meant to grab attention rather than undermining human workers.
‘We didn’t expect people to get so mad,’ Jaspar said in a blog post.
‘The goal of the campaign was always to rage bait, but we never expected the level of backlash we ended up seeing.
‘Looking forward, we’ll likely tone down the messaging to be more in line with what we actually believe rather than just clickbaiting..!
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.’
Metro has reached out to Jaspar Carmichael-Jack for comment
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