Anthropic’s newest ad is creeping people out
Anthropic’s newest ad is creeping people out
Anthropic 的最新广告让人感到毛骨悚然
Anthropic is known for its creative marketing, but the AI company may have been a little bit too creative when it conjured up its most recent advertisement. Titled “There’s hope in hard questions,” the company’s latest ad has been unsettling viewers with its weird imagery and doomer-ist tone. Anthropic 以其富有创意的营销而闻名，但这家人工智能公司在构思其最新广告时，可能表现得有点“创意过头”了。这则名为《难题中蕴含希望》（There’s hope in hard questions）的广告，因其怪异的画面和末日论调让观众感到不安。
The ad begins with a video of a burning house (not exactly a heartwarming start) before pivoting to a series of still images. These images include a crowd of people being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be a group of laborers toiling in a mine where (presumably) raw materials for smartphones are being dug up. Meanwhile, a voice-over track features different people asking questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?” In short: Not exactly the family-friendly crowd-pleaser of the year. 广告以一段房屋燃烧的视频开场（这显然不是一个温馨的开始），随后转入一系列静态图像。这些图像包括被面部识别系统监控的人群、睡在街头的无家可归者、墓地里一排排的墓碑，以及一群似乎正在矿井中劳作的工人，他们（据推测）正在挖掘制造智能手机的原材料。与此同时，画外音中不同的人在发问：“人工智能值得信任吗？”以及“如果需要的话，谁来踩下刹车？”简而言之：这绝对不是今年那种老少皆宜、皆大欢喜的广告。
At the same time, it’s also not particularly far afield from the company’s past messaging. Anthropic has consistently attempted to depict itself as the ethical foil to other AI companies. This latest marketing stunt — which leans into criticism of AI as a way to make Anthropic seem aware of (and therefore distinctly worthy of) the responsibility it carries — would appear to be more of the same. 与此同时，这与该公司过去传达的信息也并无太大出入。Anthropic 一直试图将自己塑造成其他人工智能公司的道德对照组。这次最新的营销噱头——通过倾向于对人工智能的批评，来使 Anthropic 显得对其肩负的责任有清醒的认识（并因此显得格外值得信赖）——看起来不过是故技重施。
Not everybody is having it, however. Sam Altman — the CEO of OpenAI, Anthropic’s chief rival — kicked off the criticism with some pithy trolling. “i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something,” Altman posted to X on Monday. 然而，并非所有人都买账。Anthropic 的主要竞争对手 OpenAI 的首席执行官山姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）率先发起了一番简短的嘲讽。周一，奥特曼在 X 上发帖称：“我还以为这是讽刺作品，一直在找账号名是不是拼成了 c1audeai 之类的。”
Other skeptics — many of whom seem to work in the tech industry — came out of the woodwork to remark upon Anthropic’s odd choice of imagery and tone. “Anthropic is quite an amazing company. With the worst corporate communications ever,” another person said. “[T]he EAs [effective altruists] at anthropic really must be living in a bubble of ai psychosis to think this would go down well,” a critical poster remarked. 其他持怀疑态度的人——其中许多人似乎在科技行业工作——也纷纷现身，对 Anthropic 选择的怪异图像和基调发表评论。有人说：“Anthropic 是一家相当了不起的公司，但有着史上最糟糕的企业传播。”另一位批评者评论道：“Anthropic 的那些‘有效利他主义者’（EAs）一定生活在人工智能精神错乱的泡沫中，才会认为这广告会受欢迎。”
As some have pointed out, Anthropic is following a very time-tested marketing playbook here. That playbook involves a brand calling out and owning the harms caused by its industry as a way to demonstrate that it is the company best positioned to avoid or correct those harms. But even if it’s a familiar playbook, it seems to have backfired here — particularly the decision to include a brief shot that appears to be from Arlington National Cemetery. 正如一些人指出的那样，Anthropic 在这里遵循的是一套久经考验的营销策略。这套策略涉及品牌指出并承认其行业造成的危害，以此证明它是最能避免或纠正这些危害的公司。但即便这是一套熟悉的策略，在这里似乎也适得其反——尤其是其中包含了一个看起来像是阿灵顿国家公墓的简短镜头。
“I can’t stress enough how fucked up it is that Anthropic is running an ad that includes this image asking ‘Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?’” said one commenter, sharing the cemetery image that appears in the ad. People kept coming back to the graveyard imagery. “Out of everything in that ad, this part was exceptionally weird and sinister,” another person wrote, sharing the same image. “我无法强调 Anthropic 投放这样一个包含该图像并询问‘如果需要的话，谁来踩下刹车？’的广告有多么离谱，”一位评论者在分享广告中出现的墓地图像时说道。人们不断地回到墓地图像的话题上。另一人分享了同样的图像并写道：“在那个广告的所有内容中，这一部分显得格外怪异和阴森。”
Personally, the ad vaguely reminds me of the propaganda sequence in “The Parallax View” — the 1970s paranoid thriller about an evil corporation involved in an MK-Ultra-esque conspiracy to create brainwashed assassins. This is probably not the best association to have for a company that would like to prove it is acting as a force for good in the world. 就我个人而言，这则广告隐约让我想起了 1970 年代的偏执惊悚片《视差》（The Parallax View）中的宣传片段，该片讲述了一家邪恶公司参与了一场类似“MK-Ultra”的阴谋，旨在制造被洗脑的刺客。对于一家想要证明自己是世界向善力量的公司来说，这恐怕不是什么好的联想。
Anthropic’s marketing has made a splash before. In February, during the Super Bowl, the company unleashed a slew of ads that humorously took aim at OpenAI’s decision to include ads in ChatGPT. Those ads earned it a good amount of positive buzz — as well as the smoldering rage of its competitor. Anthropic 的营销此前也曾引起轰动。今年 2 月，在超级碗期间，该公司发布了一系列广告，幽默地针对 OpenAI 在 ChatGPT 中加入广告的决定进行了抨击。这些广告为它赢得了不少正面评价，同时也招致了竞争对手的怒火。