[HN Gopher] Y Combinator Funded AI Firm's 'Stop Hiring Humans' B...
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Y Combinator Funded AI Firm's 'Stop Hiring Humans' Billboard Sparks
Outrage
Author : alister
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-12-10 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Not sure why this is controversial. Stop hiring humans is a great
| slogan.
| quantified wrote:
| It's a poor slant on what's been the case for many years. What
| did robots do for assembly lines?
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| > What did robots do for assembly lines?
|
| Made them much more efficient, reliable, and greatly improved
| quality control.
|
| I get the point you're trying to make and I think AI right
| now is mostly hot garbage, but physical automation has
| drastically improved the quality of so many products we use
| today. Cars are safer partially because the robots are so
| much better at building cars.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| Do you have a source on this? I am aware the auto industry
| is highly automated and robots outperform humans at a lot
| of the manual labor, but the word "partially" is hand-
| waving away a lot of big shifts in industrial engineering
| and national regulations. It just seems difficult to
| disentangle. (E.g. it is difficult for shops to automate
| until they get their systems in logistical order, and a
| low-regulation environment might encourage a race-to-the-
| bottom of pushing cheap robots way too hard and ignoring QC
| failures.)
| quantified wrote:
| Yes, I agree. Multidimensional effects for all tech
| applications. I should have thought more deeply there.
| tomcar288 wrote:
| based on the analysis above, I'd say they're far from
| delivering on that slogan.
| minimaxir wrote:
| > "They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI," the CEO told the
| outlet, of the ads.
|
| That is definitely not a PR-vetted response.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The same PR that green lit the billboard? Sounds like the same
| tone of voice to me
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It's _Gizmodo_. There is a good chance the article itself is a
| plant. Product quality or even existence aside, these guys
| clearly grasp marketing.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Publicity stunt
| josefritzishere wrote:
| If I get a sales call from an AI bot you're selling nothing and
| going on my blackball list forever.
| quantified wrote:
| Turing tests made useful.
| deadbabe wrote:
| you won't be able to tell the difference
| spookie wrote:
| Just a few off topic questions should do the trick.
| dboreham wrote:
| Why are answering the phone?
| olyjohn wrote:
| Because my sick elderly dad needs to be in constant contact
| with doctors and care providers on a nearly daily basis. We
| can't afford to miss a phone call that may cause a delay to
| getting help, medication, or a procedure. Most of these
| offices don't use their actual numbers on outgoing calls, so
| it's hard to know what is a spam call or a call from another
| different provider or another provider's office.
| Unfortunately, this means I have to answer the phone for
| every call that comes in. These junk calls add so much stress
| and interruption to my life. There are at least 8-10 junk
| calls per day. So I'm interrupted from my full time job, or
| the job of caring for my father at least once an hour every
| single day.
| yesbut wrote:
| > The company, which is backed by startup accelerator
| Y-Combinator, sells what it calls "AI Employees" or "Artisans."
| What the company actually sells is software designed to assist
| with customer service and sales workflow.
|
| More fancy chat AI bots.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| C'mon its funny, no?
|
| I would have gone straight for "Destroy all humans" just to hit
| it outa the park on the first ball.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's not even as clever as the strip clubs with billboards
| reading "unlicensed therapists" type of thing.
| paulgb wrote:
| So this is a clear case of this, right?
| https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
|
| (No shade to the company, good on them for getting coverage!)
| Animats wrote:
| Is their product good enough to back their hype? Probably not.
| Most of these "customer service" systems are only slightly
| smarter than "Press 1 to pay your bill, press 2 if your item
| hasn't arrived..." menu systems.
|
| Edit: It's worse than I thought. It's a spamming system.
|
| _Artisan Is The Only Outbound Tool Your Team Needs_
|
| _Ava operates within Artisan Sales, our platform that has
| everything you need for cold outbound. B2B data, warmup,
| automated lead research, bounce testing, deliverability checks
| and so much more._
|
| Like most chatbot companies, their own sales effort does not use
| their own chatbot. When you go to their site, you don't get to
| talk to their chatbot about their product.
| jameslk wrote:
| There's so many of these sales engagement products that the
| only way to stand out it seems is to be the loudest. Many of
| these companies also spam a lot of Reddits with fake reviews.
| Not a novel concept, here's a bunch more:
|
| Reply.io Lemlist Apollo.io Smartlead Instantly Saleshandy
| Quickmail Salesforge Snov Outreach
|
| There's a new one every day because the last one got
| banned/isn't effective anymore. There's a ton of leads agencies
| that gobble these up sending out tens of thousands of emails
| every day using the latest incarnation of this spamware,
| creating new domains and warming them up with fake emails to
| each other and now using LLMs to "personalize" the emails (i.e.
| the "AI") all in the attempt to evade spam filters. I get
| several of such emails every other day shilling their agency.
|
| If you've gotten cold or recruiter emails in the last few years
| where it looks like the person is just talking to themselves in
| your inbox with 6 different follow ups, it's probably thanks to
| one of these tools.
| jameslk wrote:
| "... What if we burn all our funding to create a shocking
| antisocial marketing campaign that gets the press to talk about
| our unknown startup, because the air is already saturated with
| breathless AI hype"
| karmasimida wrote:
| Hard to imagine such pretentious marketing isn't intentional,
| they want to go viral
| dmix wrote:
| This is generic Ad copy 101
|
| Even saying it purposefully sought controversy is probably
| overthinking it
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| I think it's more like "John Romero is Going to Make You His
| Bitch" - intentionally arrogant and aggressive, unintentionally
| childish.
| miohtama wrote:
| All publicity is good publicity
| almost_usual wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1h4l8df/comme...
|
| > I used this "AI" for my company about 6 months ago.
|
| > We had to cancel after only two months because it kept making
| things up that weren't easily checked. Ex. I noticed your company
| recently bought xx I think that was a savvy move
|
| > Cue people asking me what I was referring to, where they could
| find an article, etc
|
| > These unanswerable questions were all the responses I ever got
| back. The effective response rate was 0%. So not only was it not
| producing it was also actively hurting the brand with all the
| nonsensical comments.
| djaouen wrote:
| This is God's punishment to SF for worshipping Mammon. I, for
| one, welcome SF's downfall lol
| iancmceachern wrote:
| This does not represent SF. It represents a small subset of
| folks. Why must we generalize ?
| wisemang wrote:
| Because we're ... (wait for it) human.
| neilv wrote:
| If you want to double-down on the sketchiness of selling robo-
| plagiarism of human authors' creations, to put humans out of
| work, call it "Artisans".
|
| We all know that a bunch of people are getting rich off massive
| copyright violation, and anyone who understands how sketchy it is
| would rather be one of the people getting rich, than to martyr
| themselves pointlessly in front of this freight train of thieving
| greed.
|
| But go and call it "Artisans", just to add insult to world-
| crushing injury.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Tell me you haven't been out of the Bay Area in a long time
| without telling me you haven't been out of the Bay Area in a long
| time. What a tone-deaf campaign.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| I think we're all missing the point, to other AI's these are
| great advertisements! /s
| tartoran wrote:
| When you stop hiring humans you can simply say you stopped hiring
| altogether.
|
| >Hire: To engage the services of (a person) for a fee; employ.
| dylan604 wrote:
| nice use of the first entry of whatever dictionary.
|
| 2 _mainly British English_ obtain the temporary use of
| (something) for an agreed payment.
|
| Sometimes further reading is helpful
| xg15 wrote:
| > _After all, the billboards will mostly be viewed by humans,
| and, as far as can be discerned, most humans enjoy being
| employed._
|
| Gizmodo isn't exactly as far away from Artisan's mindset as
| they'd like to be if they think the reason people want jobs is
| _enjoyment_.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _"They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI," the CEO told the
| outlet, of the ads. "The way the world works is changing."_
|
| How exactly are they positioning themselves here? Being pro-
| dystopia?
| ben_w wrote:
| "Humans Need Not Apply", as CGP Grey titled one of his videos.
|
| For the moment, it is not so; for the moment, AI needs a human
| around to prevent catastrophic mistakes.
|
| When it no longer needs that help, _then_ humans need no longer
| apply.
|
| > "Artisans won't complain about work-life balance" "Artisan's
| Zoom cameras will never 'not be working' today." "Hire Artisans,
| not humans." "The era of AI employees is here." Yes, grim stuff.
| At first glance, you might wonder who the target audience for
| these billboards is. After all, the billboards will mostly be
| viewed by humans, and, as far as can be discerned, most humans
| enjoy being employed.
|
| Do we? I rather had the impression most of us like _money_ , and
| the work is just the means to get that money?
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