Anthropic is known for its creative marketing, but the AI company may have been a little too creative when it came up with its latest ad.
The company’s latest ad, titled “Hard Questions Have Hope,” is unsettling viewers with its strange imagery and doom-laden tone.
The ad opens with a video of a burning house (not exactly a heartwarming beginning), then transitions into a series of still images. These images include what appears to be crowds being monitored by facial recognition, homeless people sleeping on the streets, tombstones lining a cemetery, and (presumably) a group of workers working in a mine where the raw materials for smartphones are being mined.
Meanwhile, in the voiceover track, different people ask questions such as “Can we trust AI?” and “Who will step on the brakes if it becomes necessary?”
In other words, it’s not exactly a family crowd pleaser this year. At the same time, this isn’t too far off from the company’s previous message. Anthropic has consistently tried to portray itself as an ethical foil to other AI companies. This latest marketing strategy leans toward criticism of AI as a way to make Anthropic seem aware of the responsibility it has (and therefore clearly worth), but it appears to be something of the same.
However, not everyone experiences it.
Sam Altman, CEO of Anthropic’s biggest rival, OpenAI, began the attack with a vitriolic troll. “I thought this was satire and kept looking for handles that spelled c1audeai or something,” Altman posted to X on Monday.
Other skeptics, many of whom appear to work in the tech industry, have gone out of their way to point out Anthropic’s odd choices of imagery and tone.
Another source said, “Anthropic is a really great company. Internal communication is the worst in history.”
“Anthropology’s EAs (competent altruists) must be living in a bubble of AI psychosis to think this will work,” one critical poster said.
As some have pointed out, Anthropic is following a very proven marketing strategy here. That strategy includes how brands can call out the harm caused by their industry, acknowledge it, and demonstrate that they are the company best placed to avoid or remediate that harm.
But even though it’s a familiar playbook, it seems to have backfired here, especially the decision to include a short shot that appears to be from Arlington National Cemetery. “I can’t stress enough how awful it is that Anthropic is running an ad that includes this image that asks, ‘Who’s going to hit the brakes when the time comes?'” one commenter said, sharing an image of a cemetery that appears in the ad.
People kept coming back to see images of the cemetery. “Of all of that ad, this part was especially weird and sinister,” another person wrote, sharing the same image.
Personally, this ad vaguely reminds me of the propaganda sequence in “The Parallax View.” The film is a 1970s paranoid thriller about an evil corporation involved in an MK Ultra-esque plot to create brainwashed assassins. This is probably not the best relationship for a company that wants to prove itself as a force for good in the world.
Anthropic’s marketing has been talked about before. During the Super Bowl in February, the company released a slew of ads that humorously took aim at OpenAI’s decision to include ads in ChatGPT. These ads generated considerable positive buzz, along with smoldering anger from competitors.
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