Anthropic’s latest ad is scaring people

Anthropic is known for its creative marketing, but maybe the AI ​​company is a little too so also He was creative when he brought up his latest ad.

The company’s latest ad, titled “There’s Hope in Tough Questions,” unsettled viewers with its bizarre imagery and pessimistic tone.

The ad begins with a video of a burning house (not exactly an impressive start) before transitioning into a series of still images. These images include: a crowd of people being monitored by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping in the street, rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be a group of workers toiling in a mine where the raw materials for smartphones are (supposedly) extracted.

Meanwhile, the audio track features different people asking questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who will step on the brakes if we need to?”

In short: Not exactly the crowd-pleasing, family-friendly movie of the year. At the same time, it is also not particularly far from the company’s previous messaging. Anthropic has consistently tried to portray itself as the moral opposite of other AI companies. This latest marketing ploy — which tends to criticize AI as a way to make Anthropics seem conscious (and thus clearly deserving) of the responsibility it bears — may seem like more of the same.

However, not everyone experiences this.

Sam Altman — CEO of major rival Anthropic — fired back at the criticism with some vitriolic trolling. “I thought this was a satire, and I kept looking for the handle that should be spelled c1audeai or something like that,” Altman said. Published on X on Monday.

Other skeptics — many of whom appear to work in the tech industry — came out of the woodwork to comment on Anthropic’s strange choice of images and tone.

“Anthropic is an absolutely amazing company. With the worst corporate communications ever,” Someone else said.

“EAs in anthropology must be living in a bubble of artificial psychosis to think this is going to work out.” Note the label.

like Some have pointed outAnthropic follows the time-tested marketing playbook here. This playbook includes a brand calling out and owning up to the harms caused by its industry as a way to demonstrate that it is the best company to avoid or correct those harms.

But even if the rules of the game are familiar, they seem to backfire here — especially the decision to include a brief shot that appears to be from Arlington National Cemetery. “I can’t stress enough how ridiculous it is that Anthropic ran an ad with this image asking ‘who’s going to hit the brakes if we need to,’” one commenter said. share The photo of the cemetery that appears in the ad.

People kept coming back to photos of the cemetery. “Of everything in this ad, this part was exceptionally weird and sinister.” Someone else wrote-Share the same photo.

Personally, the ad vaguely reminds me of Propaganda sequence in Parallax view – A 70s paranoid thriller about an evil corporation involved in a MK-Ultra-esque plot to create brainwashed killers. This is probably not the best association for a company that wants to prove that it is a force for good in the world.

Anthropic marketing has made a splash before. In February, during the Super Bowl, the company unleashed A large number of ads He humorously took aim at OpenAI’s decision to do so Embed ads in ChatGPT. Those ads earned her an A Good amount of positive buzz -And also Burning anger From its competitor.