AI profiteering is now indistinguishable from trolling

In late 2024, billboards and bus stop posters bearing the slogan STOP HIRING HUMANS started showing up in San Francisco and New York. The ad spots, which turned out to be the handiwork of the enterprise AI company Artisan, went viral, buffeted by an outpouring of rage on social media. The company said it was just trolling. “It’s really just a viral marketing tactic,” the 23 year-old CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack wrote on a reddit AMA, “we don’t actually want anyone to stop hiring humans.”1 A few months later, the company closed a $25 million Series A funding round.

The company doesn’t train its own models or even build its own technology, it seems—it packages other LLMs into a software-as-a-service platform that aims to automate sales work—but whoever was behind that marketing campaign understood something about the AI boom early on: It’s all about the story. When you have a market as impossibly frothy as AI, it doesn’t matter if you have an AI-powered SaaS business with a decent UI. So does everyone else. If you want investors and the press to take note, you have to manufacture yourself a narrative, and one of the easiest ways to do so is, naturally, to troll.

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I’ve been thinking of Artisan a lot lately, as we marinate in what sure feels like the peak bubble days of generative AI. Of course, who knows, we’re in uncharted waters now, AI has eaten the American economy and the Trump administration wants to do all it can to keep the juiced times rolling, so we may yet linger in these heights of AI-inflated absurdity for a while.

But suffice to say we’re in a moment where $12 billion companies are formed entirely on the basis of one of the founders having formerly worked at OpenAI and literally nothing else. I am talking of course about former OpenAI ...