The tech industry deploys billboards like signal flares.
Pithy lines full of shibboleths, ragebait, and internet-pilled irony are plastered all over San Francisco, the tone trending increasingly obscure and provocative as more and more companies join the AI arms race. The goal of this style of marketing is almost never to relay information to consumers, but rather to bait the press and social media, go viral, and, ultimately, to show investors the company knows how to work the hype machine.
One side effect of this corpo-cultural development, it appears, is that some of our brains are so numb to this style of sloppified adspeak that it’s hard to identify genuine satire.
Case in point: A new billboard went up above Bar 49 at Market and 16th Streets from an entity that calls itself Replacement AI. It reads, “Our AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her. Don’t worry, it’s totally legal ;)”
The tone is so close to other disquieting, real ads — Artisan’s infamous “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign comes to mind — that a recent Reddit post about the billboard took it seriously, sparked a debate about media literacy in the age of AI shitpost-vertising.
“Nobody recognizes this is satire. Which is why SF is so toxic following the AI boom,” wrote another.
“Replacement AI” is a phrase freighted with anxiety right now. It is also, evidently, not SEO-friendly: Searching “replacement ai” mostly surfaces ads for AI-powered photo editing software and news stories about workers getting replaced by AI in the workforce. Keep looking for answers about the billboard, and you’ll find yourself staring down the barrel of the AI apocalypse.
Perhaps that’s the point. Visit replacement.ai directly, and you’ll find a website that is clearly satire.
“Humans are no longer necessary” is splashed across the homepage. “So we’re getting rid of them. Replacement.AI can do anything a human can do — but better, faster, and much, much cheaper.”
The website paints a picture of the “post-human future,” listing what sorts of activities will fill our days once the corporate overlords sell out humanity: Humans will enjoy pastimes like “machine worship,” “violent crime,” “preparing your body for biofuel sacrifice,” and “longing for a different future.”
The Products tab introduces you to Humbert™, the addictive and corruptive LLM made just for children, while the Leadership tab tells Replacement AI’s founder stories: “At 25, Dan realized why no one wanted to hang out with him or invite him to parties: people are stupid. So he built an AI company with the mission of creating a future where no one gets to have real friends or parties.” “Dan” even has an X account, where he (whoever he really is) has been posting in a LinkedIn grindset AI founder tone since September.
For such an immersive ad campaign, which also has billboards in Times Square, I was kind of let down when I found what the whole thing ladders up to: An auto-filled form to help people contact their local representatives about “the issue of unsafe AI development.”
“Dan” and his team at Replacement AI did not immediately respond to my requests for an interview. Maybe I’ll buy a billboard that says, “Dan, pls email me back”?
