AI might finally have its first good ad campaign and it tells us everything about how the technology will actually change the world

We have been subject to threats on our lives and our jobs – all in the service of a technology that people also think we should invest in. Now we might finally have seen how AI companies could convince the world that they are actually going to help us, writes Andrew Griffin

Reconnecting: How Ai can be used for good (Getty/iStock)

For a technology marketing campaign, AI’s rollout has been unusual, though it’s certainly attention-grabbing: you’re all going to die. Or, if not die, then be made jobless and redundant and have to upend your whole life. It’s unusual twice over in that there’s no real call to action, nothing particular that you can do; give AI companies money, maybe, or get used to using it, or just panic.

The first glimpses that might be changing came last year, when Apple launched its new Apple Intelligence and the iPhone 16 that was marketed as a new phone specifically made for AI. That phone came with an ad campaign, fronted by Bella Ramsey, that at least claimed to show the benefits of the technology, and the ways that they might make life easier, or better.

But the campaign was something of a failure. One of the ads showed Ramsey asking their phone for the name of a person they’d previously met; it was based on an AI feature that Apple had shown off for its then-new iOS 18, but which it later said wouldn’t arrive in time, and which still hasn’t. (That ad has since been pulled.) More broadly, the ads were criticised for the fact that they seemed to be taking aim at some of the parts of life that people might want to stay sacred and human: the writing of a funeral address (admittedly, one for a goldfish), and reading an email so that Ramsey could bluff their way through a meeting.

But we might now have seen the first good AI ad. Arriving in a artsy blizzard of stylish, fast cuts, Anthropic might have fixed the big problem with advertising artificial intelligence.

It focuses on the obvious – but, so far, obviously lacking – claim that there are lots of problems in today’s world but that AI makes it easier to deal with or solve them. It is such basic marketing advice that it feels stupid even to write it down: find a way that your product improves people’s lives, and show it to them. But that basic principle has been lacking from most discussion of the technology so far.

That is not all that the ad is, of course. It has all the panache of an Apple ad, or at least the sort of upstart and oppositional energy that used to be the hallmark of the company. It is a simple but clever idea delivered engagingly and with energy. But it is also a breakthrough just by offering something so plain as a reason to be excited about AI.

That reason, it turns out, is less to do with computers and chips and data farms and everything else, more to do with the straightforward ways that technology makes things easy. Really, this has always been failing of bad tech marketing; the belief that what the industry is selling is silicon, when it is in fact solutions.

It is a return to the humans who are, for now at least, the people doing the actual thinking and buying. Again, that should be something obvious when talking about technology. But AI has so far felt like something that happens elsewhere, using other people’s money to buy hardware you can never see to run software that nobody will ever really understand; the main way we are allowed to believe it will change our lives is by turning it upside down. The Anthropic ad is a return to what people actually enjoy doing: doing stuff.

“Keep thinking is a rallying cry to problem solvers everywhere – and a promise that what once felt impossible is now within reach," Andrew Stirk, Anthropic’s head of brand marketing, told Creative Review. “Claude is for those who see AI not as a shortcut, but as a thinking partner to take on their most meaningful challenges.”

It would be nice to believe that the reason this hasn’t happened so far is that the bosses and marketing chiefs of AI companies have simply been naive or myopic. Instead, they haven’t really needed to talk like this. Because AI is primarily infrastructure, not a product.

For all that people like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg try and paint themselves as modern wizards in charge of a technology they don’t fully grasp but which only they can steward, their companies are engaged in a frenzied fight to build the biggest data centres and the largest models. Because it looks like the current winners of the AI race will not be those with the genius breakthroughs in actually building AI systems – they are all, basically, running on the same ideas at this point – but instead will be the companies that are able to run those AI systems with the most powerful computers.

Those AI bosses think of themselves as the inventors of the first cars, all thrumming power and hot innovation. But in truth they are like the politicians who decide where and how the motorways they drive on are built, which is primarily a question of resource allocation. Car adverts are exciting and alluring; the motorways don’t need to advertise, because you’re going to have to drive on them anyway.