BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Negativity Bias, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 24.6% saturation with 253 hits. Analysis detected 1,734 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,029 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 53.8% and a BS Rank of 57% (9,560 of 21,886 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 56.30% of the article peer group.
The latest anti-AI ads visible from the 101 aren’t what they seem.
Two weeks ago, San Francisco’s famously inscrutable billboards got a new addition: monochrome signs with the words “AI Dread?”
There’s no logo, company name, or website, just a phone number that plays prerecorded messages and an option to leave a voicemail.
Similar paper flyers were plastered around the city, and matching signs have popped up in NYC.
In an increasingly predictable plot twist, a technology company is behind the campaign.
An “AI-first” company that claims to have more AI agents than human employees.
The advertiser is San-Francisco based productivity software unicorn Notion, and this ad is the latest example of tech companies using anti-AI language to make its own AI go down easier — not by pitching you its tools, but by talking you off the AI-dread ledge.
The company is “not trying to sell you Notion,” co-founder Akshay Kothari told The Standard, but to move people away from concerns like, “‘AI agents are taking away your jobs, and there is no future.’”
We called so you don’t have to
When you dial 1-231-HIT-US-UP, a recording greets you: “Hello, you’ve reached the AI Dread hotline.
We’re all feeling it — the nagging worry that AI can do our jobs.
So if you’d like to put your existential dread on hold for a few minutes and reconnect with the human side of work, please select from the following options.”
They number one to seven, the first six being prerecorded clips of office sounds, like a woman named Emily bringing her dog to work, employees bickering about the office thermostat, and four minutes of “office ASMR.”
The last option invites the caller to leave a voicemail saying what they really think about AI.
“To return to a feeling of existential AI dread,” the voice says after, “simply hang up.”
Notion has spent the past three years adding AI assistants and AI agents to its productivity software.
Despite its booming number of AI agents, Kothari stressed that “the company continues to grow humans”; its headcount has risen 85% in two years.
The agents, he said, help his staff “get rid of busy work.”
The idea of “this future where just one person is running their company with AI agents seemed very lonely to us,” Kothari said.
He views AI as augmenting, rather than replacing, people.
“We are long [on] humans.”
Thousands of people have called the number so far, some spending up to 30 minutes listening to the options.
Two hundred people left voicemails, said Kohthari.
Some were lighthearted; one caller said if “someone wanted to replace all AI with Corbin from Love Island” they’d be fine with that.
Another voicemail was just 15 seconds of someone screaming.
Some were more earnest; one said, “I hope that AI will be a tool that everyone can use so that they can generate meaning in their life.”
Another praised the recordings, saying they “made the reality of office space into something comforting.”
Notion has no plans to release the voicemails, said Kothari, who described them as an “archive … a pulse of how people are feeling.”
When marketing uses actual fears
The campaign is tapping into real anxiety about AI and layoffs, plus a growing deluge of AI slop and related AI fatigue, to try and get people on board with more AI.
It comes at a time when there’s a growing rift between tech’s haves and have-nots, marked by anti-AI protests and the Molotov cocktail attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home by a man afraid AI would cause human extinction.
The medium fits the message.
AI billboards have long been a San Francisco punchline, with their nonsensical phrases aimed at the tiny slice of people who buy enterprise AI, leaving everyone else feeling like outsiders in their own city.
There’s been a spate of aggressive pro-human anti-AI messaging lately.
One of the most prominent, Replacement.AI, ran a campaign last year that included billboards trolling residents that their AI “does your daughter’s homework,” and “Reads her bedtime stories.”
Replacement.AI is not a real company.
It was created by The Future of Life Institute, a billionaire-funded Bay Area AI safety nonprofit focused on building guardrails around AI development.
Its goal is to channel AI panic into political action with a call to contact local representatives and demand safety standards for the AI industry.
“The Replacement.AI billboard is so outrageous … it’s rage baiting,” said DJ O’Neil, CEO of San Francisco creative agency Hub Strategy & Communication.
“They pulled you into their website … that’s a sign of really good marketing.”
The shock value drew him in, he said.
“I started reading it, and I was like, oh my god, what a bunch of assholes … then I’m like, no, this is a brilliant piece of satire.”
What struck him most was that it was clear it had real money behind it.
A muddled message
O’Neil’s initial impression was that the billboard was for an AI company.
He thought the angle was, “Did you pick the wrong AI for your company?
Do you have dread over it?
We can help.”
The tell, he said, was that the hotline number spelling out HIT-US-UP didn’t read as sincere.
Something like “WE-CARE” would have suggested it was actually about the real dread people are feeling.
“We’re here in San Francisco where people are losing their jobs because of AI.”
His theory was that it was trying to create a message about bringing AI back into the equation.
Otherwise, “why would they be essentially bashing AI?”
Michael Trazzi, founder of Stop the AI Race and organizer of San Francisco’s marches, had high hopes after he listened to the recordings.
The options all seemed to “point to some sort of office dread or technology already consuming how people relate to each other,” he said.
At first he thought the billboard was “an interesting piece of art” that resonated with how locals feel in regards to the volume of AI ads in the city.
That was before he found out it was a tech company all along.
“Damn,” he said.
Speakers
5speakers41%attributed speech603writer words
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95%flagged-word coverageAkshay Kothari
108 attributed words25% of attributed speech75% writer coverage
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Analysis
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