Rage bait, rage bait, everywhere.
You can’t walk down the street these days without feeling like San Francisco is trolling you. Ads designed to evoke red-hot anger and existential dread are all across the city.
Billboards and bus shelters proclaiming in bold letters “Humanity had a good run” began appearing in October. They cryptically link to DearWorld.ai (opens in new tab), a website with letters from an anonymous whistleblower who “can’t stay silent any longer.”
The letters, which ironically seem ChatGPT-generated, warn of a white-collar job apocalypse and the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt playing out on a global and permanent scale. They say AI is slowly eroding our critical thinking skills as we outsource tasks like writing emails, summarizing articles, and independently exploring ideas to chatbots.
“Over the coming weeks, I’m going to demonstrate, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are marching mindlessly towards the end of humanity,” one pseudo letter says. “The next five years will determine whether AI serves humanity or enslaves it.”
But who was behind this website, and what did they want?
Last month, the mystery company hit San Francisco with another campaign: ads for NurtureOS (opens in new tab), a fictional AI parenting app that promises to raise the optimal child through constant surveillance using smart home technology.
“You’re a bad parent. Let’s fix that,” one ad says, showing a parent receiving a notification to “delay response for optimal resilience training” while a baby cries in a crib.
Ads for the fictional app NurtureOS have spurred outrage on Reddit. | Source: Abby Connect
This week, the force behind the doomsday campaigns revealed itself. Rather anticlimactically, it’s a Las Vegas-based company that’s hoping to get customers for its hybrid human/AI receptionist product.
“We wanted to explain our vision of selling both humans and AI to the world in a quick way that gets a reaction and gets eyeballs and changes the narrative,” said Nathan Strum, CEO of Abby Connect. “The goal wasn’t to instill fear but to start a conversation.”
Yet Strum said he challenged himself to think of the most twisted ideas he could put on San Francisco billboards.
“They’re replacing our therapists, they’re replacing our friends, and so we thought, what is the holy grail of things you just cannot outsource that we could create a fake app around?” Strum said of the genesis of the fake AI parenting app. “The crazy thing is, some people actually believed it was a real app, which shows where everyone’s head is at.”
The idea did not seem far-fetched to some. “There is absolutely no chance this won’t happen sooner or later. The economic incentives are there,” one Reddit user commented on a thread about the ads in r/mildlyinfuriating (opens in new tab).
Inspiration came from recent rage-bait marketing campaigns that have inspired viral reactions, like Artisan’s “Stop hiring humans” billboards and Cluely’s “Cheat on everything” tagline. Ads for the AI wearable companion Friend were vandalized on the New York subway (opens in new tab).
The marketing trend is so rampant that Oxford University Press declared “rage bait” the word of the year (opens in new tab), defined as content that’s designed to elicit outrage by being provocative or offensive. Usage of the word has tripled in the past 12 months.
Artisan’s ”Stop Hiring Humans” campaign last year inspired death threats and raked in millions of dollars. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard
Strum insists that, unlike Artisan and Friend, Abby isn’t trying to replace employees and relationships. He said Abby is combining the efficiency of AI with the intelligence of human receptionists.
Small businesses that use Abby can sign up for an AI receptionist instead of a human one to answer customers’ calls. But if a caller has to repeat a question or the AI senses frustration, a human receptionist parachutes in to take over the conversation.
Strum said Abby employs around 60 receptionists, some of whom are being retrained into more technical roles and receiving higher salaries. The rest of the tech industry, he said, isn’t thinking about the role humans will play in the future.
Abby, which has been selling human receptionist services to small businesses since 2005, launched the AI product in June. Strum said some clients are paying for a hybrid service in which a human answers the phone and an AI agent later steps in to help with scheduling and taking orders. He added that specialized clients like dentists enjoy having AI receptionists because they can be trained on domain-specific knowledge that their human counterparts lack.
Abby isn’t seeing increased sales from the ad campaign, but Strum said he’s playing the long game. The company, which he said is profitable, is opening its first San Francisco office next month in SoMa, so Abby revealed itself as the company behind the ad campaign.
“San Francisco is the epicenter of the conversation,” Strum said. “We should all be pro-AI and pro-human.”