{"id":240501,"date":"2025-10-25T19:37:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T19:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/240501\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T19:37:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T19:37:07","slug":"bystanders-horrified-by-slightly-too-honest-ai-billboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/240501\/","title":{"rendered":"Bystanders Horrified by Slightly-Too-Honest AI Billboard"},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco is plastered with billboards advertising AI tech<\/a>, 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\u2019s attitude toward regular humans.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur AI does your daughter\u2019s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her,\u201d reads a billboard asking you to visit a website called Replacement.AI<\/a>. \u201cDon\u2019t worry, it\u2019s totally legal [winking emoji].\u201d<\/p>\n

Visiting the website finds an even more overt message: huge text proclaiming that humans are \u201cno longer necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStupid. Smelly. Squishy. It\u2019s time for a machine solution,\u201d it reads. \u201cAt Replacement.AI, we believe that building AI tools to fix the world\u2019s most pressing challenges is an unprofitable waste of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also an actual quote<\/a> by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: \u201cAI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there\u2019ll be great companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before you get your pitchforks out: it\u2019s satire. The ad was highlighted in a now-viral tweet<\/a> by makeup artist and influencer Matt Bernstein, before being reshared across the internet in places like Reddit<\/a>, where the joke was lost on many users.<\/p>\n

To be fair, we can\u2019t blame them. The shtick is only slightly more outrageous than billboards for actual AI startups that have been plaguing Silicon Valley, like the \u201cStop Hiring Humans<\/a>\u201d campaign, which was obviously designed to stir up controversy, as are many others. Angering Luddites or generally just ticking you off<\/a> is the name of the game<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a young industry, and apparently so are the people running its marketing. These AI startups may be competitors, but they\u2019re all in on an internet-poisoned inside joke together, which the regular Joes that they\u2019re ostensibly advertising to are not.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> (often unsuccessfully<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not going to bulls**t you about superhuman AI \u2019empowering workers,’\u201d reads its website. \u201cWe\u2019re explicitly building machines that are going to be better than you at every task.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of its pages is dedicated to the human artists threatened by AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo the Artists replaced by AI \u2013 thank you,\u201d it says, above a video message from one of the company\u2019s purported representatives. The page also has a real quote from OpenAI that the company submitted to the UK government<\/a>: \u201cIt would be impossible to train today\u2019s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clearly, a lot of effort went into pulling this off. And money: another user spotted several Replacement.AI billboards in Times Square<\/a>. It also has a \u201cCEO\u201d named Dan, with his own Twitter profile<\/a> and accompanying smug video message. <\/p>\n

Overall, it\u2019s 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<\/a>, perhaps it won\u2019t be just a joke for much longer.<\/p>\n

Replacement.AI has a solution for that future: a form where you can \u201cBeg for a place in our bunker.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cJust record a video explaining why you agree that humans deserve replacing, and why you deserve a space,\u201d it reads, \u201cand we\u2019ll maybe consider thinking about letting you in.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on AI: Meta Allows Deepfake That Irish Presidential Election Is Canceled to Go Viral<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Francisco is plastered with billboards advertising AI tech, all in varying degrees of in-your-face dystopic. Even so,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240502,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-240501","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}