Three billboards outside San Francisco, California

San Francisco. The whole artificial intelligence race will end with the most indestructible of slogans: ‘My detergent gets things whiter’. Forget Wall Street’s quarterly results; here, Main Street is the real battlefield – on the billboards along Highway 101, on bus and tram shelters, and on the rooftops of buildings in the Financial District and North Beach. On the face of it, nothing new: tech adverts in the Bay Area are a classic. But this time there’s added controversy – the back-and-forth between start-ups and the outrage of coders.

The dozens of billboards advertising AI products and services, featuring graphics with lines of code and very few words – the only advertising in the world that means nothing to ordinary people – are there to signal status. The best spaces cost up to three million dollars a year and the waiting list can run to months. Prices are driven by scarcity rather than visibility: in March 2002, San Francisco residents approved a ban on installing new billboards, and since then, there have been 1,500 available spaces – all taken, and everyone wants one. It is pure status: seeing your own line of code on the wall of a building. The term ‘human’ is ubiquitous: anything that’s AI is also ‘human’ – like ‘plant-based’ for food at the airport or ‘natural’ for powerful stain-removing detergents. It all began with a reverse job advert. Two years ago, the start-up Artisan – founded by 23-year-old Englishman Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and an astrophysicist to launch the product AVA, an AI sales agent that searches for leads, writes emails and books appointments – took to the streets with posters reading ‘Stop hiring humans’. Initially, the public paid no attention, and the company was taken aback by this indifference. The billboard reappeared on Highway 101, near the airport: still no reaction. So Artisan bought advertising space on fifty bus shelters in the city centre – where real human beings are – and upped the ante: “Artisan is happy to work 70 hours a week”, “The lot at Artisan don’t give a damn about work-life balance”. The strategy succeeds. At that time, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack is travelling in Miami and decides not to return: “If I go back to San Francisco, they’ll kill me,” he says. However, it is not the general public that is outraged—it is the other technology companies. Abby Connect, a virtual secretarial service, covers underground station shelters with the slogan ‘Humanity: stop firing humans’. Let’s stop sacking humans. Its CEO says that something about Artisan’s campaign had struck a deep chord with him. Juicebox, a recruitment platform using artificial agents, runs digital billboard adverts with ‘Hire more humans’ and ‘Hire your 10x engineer’. Notion, a productivity software company that claims to have more artificial agents than human employees, fills the city in July 2026 with monochrome posters bearing only the words ‘AI Dread?’ – anxiety caused by artificial intelligence – with no logo, no website, just a telephone number that plays recorded messages of support, much like the suicide prevention service on the Golden Gate Bridge.

What is the rationale, in today’s context, for displaying a logo on street walls to promote a completely intangible product? And, more importantly, why do it with cryptic slogans such as ‘Too much B2B SAAS’, ‘Intelligent AF’ and ‘npx skills’? observers are asking in academic circles. Louise Mozingo, who heads the Urban Design programme at Berkeley, admits she has no idea what those billboards are advertising. Yet, if the message remains incomprehensible, the advertisement is fulfilling its purpose: it excludes and includes in a single stroke. After all, the wall is a space for graffiti, tags and premium advertising hoardings. And what if the product’s intended audience is unable to understand the poster? But who said the audience has to be a human being?