Yesterday I wrote a piece about the AI-driven “white collar recession,” which felt to me like a bunch of bullshit marketing. This morning as I perused my morning paper I came across this extraordinary example of exactly what I’m on about. The image above is an ad in The Information’s morning tech news roundup. It’s an undisguised appeal aimed at marketing professionals, playing directly to their fears that they’re about to be replaced by AI. The solution, of course, is … “Head” — the “world’s first AI marketer” which, the company claims, is “not a tool, it’s a new species.”
This kind of claptrap is clogging up any reasonable dialog about the role of AI in our economy. On its home page, Head claims to be “hired” by more than 50,000 companies — hey, that’s a lot! But just a bit of legwork reveals Head is … well, the word “questionable” comes to mind.
Timed to this morning’s ad in The Information, today Head released a hyperbolic press release claiming its clients have already saved $100 million using its products (that’s just one zero away from a billion!). The release quotes its founder, Kay Feng, whose LinkedIn page helpfully does not resolve, though Google’s index finds photos from previous crawls that look suspiciously like the AI slop nearly all of us have to endure in spammy text and DM come ons. The company has a Youtube channel with one video (released today), an Instagram account with one…
