In the face of wide speculation about how artificial intelligence will impact workers in the Bay Area and beyond, a series of billboards plays on those concerns, advertising what appears to be a nightmare scenario where people are entirely replaced by computers.

The CEO of the company behind those billboards told CBS News Bay Area he was looking to make a statement.

For anyone who has ever worried that AI might come for their job, it is an unnerving billboard. Around San Francisco, the ads advise companies to “stop hiring humans.” Some of the signs on city bus stops go so far to say that the companies AI employees “won’t come into work hung over” or “take naps at work.”

Founder and CEO of Artisan AI Jaspar Carmichael-Jack admitted that the billboards play on common fears about artificial intelligence. He was also quick to acknowledge what many may already suspect; the ads are deliberately suggestive and not to be taken literally. 

“I think that going into this, we knew that if we made billboards like everyone else, no one is going to care. If I put a billboard up that said, ‘We are going to improve your outbound sales,’ then we wouldn’t be talking right now. It wouldn’t matter. We’d spend the money and we’d get nothing from it. So we went into it, knowing that we had to be provocative. We had to do something different to draw attention.”

Carmichael-Jack says his AI sales software isn’t for businesses looking to shed jobs, but those hoping to automate some undesirable tasks.

“And they are excited to be able to hand off the manual work that they don’t enjoy doing to focus on real human work, and doing things only a human can do,” Carmichael-Jack said. “And I think that’s what we’re really going after. We’re going after replacing the work that people don’t want to do so they can do the work they actually enjoy.”

But the ads do play off of a widespread fear. An August poll found 48% of working Americans think AI will decrease the number of jobs available in their industry. 

That raises the questions of whether that is actually happening and how such changes would that be measured. Businesses usually don’t just come out and publicly detail their private strategies or explain how AI might be affecting their employment. So the first step is learning something businesses won’t necessarily detail.

“So we overcome that challenge by leveraging very detailed data on the job postings of those firms and the resumes of their workers,” explained Anastassia Fedyk, a behavioral economist at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “So think LinkedIn profiles, PDF resumes, or the resumes people submit to jobs, so we can be able to see who the firms are hiring.”

Fedyk is part of a remarkable sleuthing effort. With help from partners around the world, they’re following enough resumes and LinkedIn pages to have a track on 60% to 70% of the American professional workforce. So they’ve been able to see which businesses have been hiring AI expertise, years before those companies would publicly talk about those programs.

“And then link that to what’s happening at the firm,” Fedyk said. “The public information like its sales, their employment numbers. That’s what’s in the reports.”

And from all of that they can say that most businesses that move towards AI actually add employees.

“On net, in most sectors — and again, there are some sectors and some tasks where it is replacing jobs — but on net in most sectors, employment does not decline when the firm starts investing in AI,”  Fedyk said. “They leverage AI tools for innovation. Then you have additional product patents, additional trademarks, you have to hire additional product managers to manage products. You need more salespeople to sell the product.”

“We actually do secretly love humans,” Carmichael-Jack told KPIX. “We have a lot of humans on our team and we’re hiring a lot more.”

Artisan’s billboards probably say more about the AI business frenzy than the impact on human employment. It is worth noting that Artisan is advertising to potential buyers in a market that is still taking shape. Many traditional businesses are thinking about what AI might be able to do for them, and emerging AI producers are fighting each other for that business.

“So there’s a lot of competition for market share among the firms that are producing the technology,” Fedyk said of the billboard blitz. “That of course will lead to more catchy advertising.”

“And to be completely candid, I don’t think anyone should stop hiring humans,” Carmichael-Jack added. “There’s a lot of things that humans can do that AI cannot do. And when we get to the point where we don’t require humans, we should have universal income by then, and there should not be a five day work week.”

Wilson Walker

Wilson Walker joined KPIX 5 in July 2007. After 10 years producing newscasts, Wilson became a Multimedia Journalist (MMJ) in 2012, meaning he shoots, writes and edits all of his own stories.