Key facts
- Anthropic's new ad, "There's hope in hard questions," uses unsettling imagery and a doomer-ist tone.
- Visuals include a burning house, facial recognition surveillance, a homeless person, tombstones, and mine laborers.
- The ad features questions about AI trustworthiness and control.
- Sam Altman criticized the ad, calling it potentially satirical.
- The ad's use of cemetery imagery has been particularly noted as strange and sinister.
Anthropic's latest advertisement, titled "There's hope in hard questions," has generated unease among viewers due to its unsettling imagery and doomer-ist tone. The ad opens with a shot of a burning house, followed by still images depicting facial recognition surveillance, a homeless person, rows of tombstones, and laborers in a mine. A voice-over track includes questions such as "Can AI be trusted?" and "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?"
The company's marketing strategy often positions itself as an ethical counterpoint to other AI firms, and this ad appears to align with that approach by acknowledging AI's potential harms. However, the ad has faced backlash, with Sam Altman, CEO of a rival company, posting on X that he initially thought it was satire. Other tech industry professionals have also commented on the ad's unusual choice of imagery and tone, with some suggesting that Anthropic's effective altruist team is out of touch.
Critics have particularly focused on a brief shot that appears to be from Arlington National Cemetery, questioning the appropriateness of using such imagery while asking "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?" This graveyard imagery has been described as exceptionally weird and sinister, drawing comparisons to propaganda sequences in films like "The Parallax View." Anthropic has previously made marketing splashes, including Super Bowl ads that humorously targeted OpenAI's ChatGPT ads, which garnered positive attention.