The British founder of an AI company based in San Francisco has hailed the success of its ‘rage-bait’ marketing campaign despite receiving death threats.
Late last year Artisan AI unleashed a major advertising campaign in the US city urging people to stop hiring humans – and the response was immense.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, in his early 20s and from Surrey, founded the AI employee startup in Silicon Valley in 2023 with Dr Rupert Dodkins, who has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Oxford. Dr Dodkins left the company in May last year.
In December, Carmichael-Jack told SFGate of the ads: “They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI.
“The way the world works is changing… we wanted something that would draw eyes — you don’t draw eyes with boring messaging.”
Artisan received hundreds of death threats and hate mail, but the CEO now says the campaign was meant to grab attention, not undermine human workers, as he backtracked on his earlier message.
“The goal of the campaign was always to rage bait, but we never expected the level of backlash we ended up seeing,” said Carmichael-Jack.
“We don’t actually want people to stop hiring humans and I don’t actually think AI is dystopian. The real goal for us is to automate the work that humans don’t enjoy, and to make every job more human.”
Who is Jaspar Carmichael-Jack? Briton launches ‘stop hiring humans’ campaign in San Francisco
Artisan AI, which has raised $21.1m in funding and participated in the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator programme, is developing ‘Artisans’. These are described as human-like digital workers which automate job workflows from end to end and act as additions to teams, rather than software tools for them to use.
Carmichael-Jack told us in an interview in late 2023 that this makes them notably distinct from existing solutions, which require constant management from a human.
Artisan’s first digital worker – Ava the business development rep – was at the forefront of the clickbait marketing campaign. Beaming down on passers-by, she was plastered alongside the statement ‘Stop Hiring Humans’, while further billboards and phrases were also put out declaring ‘Artisans Won’t Complain About Work-Life Balance’ and ‘Artisans Won’t Come Into Work Hungover’.
Carmichael-Jack says the campaign made his startup go viral for replacing jobs, resulting in over $2m of new ARR within two months, while the guerilla tactics helped to generate over a billion online impressions.
The campaign continued to go viral after Artisan doubled down on the controversy and posted an image from its sponsorship at TechCrunch’s booth on Reddit, captioning ‘Hired humans telling you to stop hiring humans’.
The post quickly racked up 35,000 upvotes and millions of impressions. However, moderators eventually removed the post after learning Artisan was behind it.
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After inboxes were flooded with hate and death threats, the firm said it wasn’t trying to target the average worker at risk of losing their job to AI – but rather the big conglomerates who want to increase productivity and output.
“The impact exceeded our wildest expectations,” continued its CEO. “When I meet new people in San Francisco, 70% of the time they know about Artisan and what we do. Before, that number was around 5%.
“We’ve seen thousands of sales meetings getting booked. October and November became our biggest months ever, bringing in over $2m in new ARR.”
Carmichael-Jack – who told us Ava was launched within months of being sketched out on paper – previously founded international branding agency Burst Digital.
“Our vision is to have teams of Artisans working alongside, and integrated within, human teams,” he said in our interview.
He also previously founded Assist, a platform for booking on-demand services in London.