Can These ChatGPT Ads Make You Love AI?
Artificial intelligence is coming cure cancerto solve the mysteries of life and free mankind from toil. But maybe, when all is said and done, this will give you the right pasta recipe to impress someone you have a crush on.
That seems to be the main message of a massive advertising campaign for ChatGPT, a chatbot and virtual assistant developed by OpenAI.
30-second campaign ads created by a New York City creative agency Any Islandthey have a distinct retro aesthetic, reminiscent of the days when everyone carried smartphones. Each emphasizes human beings and downplays technology.
In a A TV spot called “Dish,” a young woman tastes a home-cooked meal prepared by a young man in his city apartment. As she takes the first bite, her expression goes from neutral, perhaps even a little skeptical, to one of agreement.
“Dish” is steeped in references to the old, analog world. The apartment is decorated with stacks of books, a small white gas stove that looks like a holdover from the 1950s, and a glowing mid-century modern light fixture. The background song, “Fool” by indie artist Perfume Genius, is a throwback to 70s soul from 2014.
White letters appear on the screen: “I need a recipe that says, ‘I like you, but I want to play it cool.'” This is the challenge a young man put into ChatGPT. The camera pulls back to reveal the brick exterior of the old building. More text will appear. It’s a chatbot response in the style of scrolling movie credits. “Here’s the twist: lemon-garlic butter pasta with cherry tomatoes,” he begins. After outlining the recipe, the robot goes through encouraging words from a trainer or friend: “First of all, don’t sweat. You’ve got it.”
The ads come at a time when many people are uneasily grappling with artificial intelligence. In a poll he conducted NBC news57 percent of registered voters in the United States said they believed it would do more harm than good. AND Pew Research survey found that about half of Americans believed that artificial intelligence would “impair people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships.”
Isle of Any, who worked for The New York Times, has created seven thirty-second ads for ChatGPT so far. In addition, several billboards created by OpenAI’s in-house team have appeared in Los Angeles, New York and other major cities. The campaign started last fall and is still ongoing.
Each TV spot, according to Laurie Howell and Toby Treyer-Evans, is designed to draw viewers into what feels like a movie scene., founders of the Isle of Any. The commercials were shot on custom Kodak film and the production design was the work of Florencia Martinová, who helped create the look of the Oscar-winning film “One Battle After Another.”
“Our goal was to find a cinematic, emotional way to celebrate the positive and empowering powers of ChatGPT,” Howell and Treyer-Evans wrote in an email. “We wanted this work to talk about how ChatGPT is a tool – a tool that works ‘with us, not for us.’ They added that “no part of the campaign was created by artificial intelligence.”
Only young people appear in the advertisements. The casting was an attempt to target “a young cohort of people who are starting to use it in their everyday lives,” Howell and Treyer-Evans said.
Ken Goffman, a technical writer who goes by the moniker RU Siriusit seemed confused that the campaign didn’t try to convey the full power and potential of AI. “It’s a very carefully denatured version of what ChatGPT and other AIs are bringing to the world,” he said. “They seem to appeal especially to bored young people.”
In many advertising campaigns, the message is at odds with the product being sold. Insurers, necessarily dealing with car accidents and death, present a comical face to the world: Progressive goes hard on the kinks of Flo and her friends, and Geico introduces a cute lizard. Similarly, many advertisements for prescription drugs show people rejoicing in idyllic settings rather than the ailments the drugs treat.
In ChatGPT’s ads, the revolutionary technology — one that could be the most dangerous invention in human history, warned Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI — is presented as a useful digital friend.
“This Frankenstein’s monster technology that’s going to come and destroy us all has a scary, scary cultural background,” he said Randall Rothenberglongtime marketing executive and writer and former executive director of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association. “What’s the best way to create comfort around that? It’s to say, ‘No, it’s just an extension You. This makes it possible You bring out your full humanity, plan a vacation with your siblings.”
Rothenberg meant “Trip,” another retro-tinged ad in the ChatGPT campaign. It focuses on a Gen Z brother and sister who hit the road in a Volvo 240 station wagon, a car that was discontinued in 1993. The boxy car recedes into a lush countryside to the beat of “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show,” Neil Diamond’s 1969 minor hit.
ChatGPT billboards are no less a throwback. One shows a pair of young dudes who look like hipsters from ten years ago. They are sitting in front of a cluttered garage, clearly taking a break from their start-up project. It’s a reassuring image that suggests the world hasn’t changed all that much since it was released in 2017 “Attention is all you need,” a landmark scientific paper that introduced the basic architecture for most machine learning systems.
That touch of comforting nostalgia is what makes the ads effective, according to Robert Cornish, the company’s CEO Richtercorporate consulting and communications firm. “New technology often brings confusion,” said Cornish, who wrote a blog post praising the campaign. “And confusion blocks sales and adoption.
Rather than performing ChatGPT magic, OpenAI “took a page out of Steve Jobs’ playbook,” Cornish added. He cited the successful “Get a Mac” campaign from the mid-2000s created for Apple by ad agency TBWA Worldwide. These ads feature two actors—one cool, one square—intended to personify the Mac and other computers. They stand against a white background and discuss technical matters in witty, everyday terms.
“If you want something to be adopted, bring it down to the third grade level,” Cornish said. “ChatGPT ads help counter the fear of AI and make it safe for everyday people. They need it to be relatable.”
The absence of authoritative figures in the campaign may send another signal, according to political scientist and historian Thomas Frank.
“ChatGPT has definitely made parents redundant,” Frank said in an email. “In every installment of the series, we see young people alone in the world with ChatGPT guiding them, always there for them, telling them how to study in college, how to exercise, how to cook, how to grow up, basically. He’s the parent we all wish we had, who is omnipresent and omnipresent, totally forgiving, totally understanding.”
AI executives have presented the technology as a kind of superbrain that can solve the most complex problems. In a 2024 blog post, Altman promised “astounding triumphs” that would soon become “commonplace” as a result of artificial intelligence, including “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and discovering all of physics.” However, ChatGPT’s ads pitch AI as an enhanced search engine or virtual assistant.
That seems to be the point, Rothenberg said. OpenAI’s business model, like Google’s, relies on selling ads. And in the nearly three years since Google introduced its own artificial intelligence assistant, Gemini, the companies have been jostling for attention. In other words, ChatGPT’s advertising campaign has arrived at what could be crucial for OpenAI.
The company was founded in 2015 and is rumored to be going public, despite facing negative publicity. Recent reports have described it extravagant spending, unmet revenue targets and lagging behind in the AI race. The New Yorker came out in April 16,000 word investigative article details the power struggles within OpenAI and portrays Altman as a congenital liar. The company also has a powerful foe in Elon Musk, who sued unsuccessfully in an apparent attempt to put it out of business.
Anthropic, the $900 billion company behind the Claude AI model, has taken a very different advertising path than OpenAI. It ran during the last Super Bowl broadcast engaging advertisement which showed a young man seeking AI advice on how to improve his relationship with his mother. He is suddenly disappointed when the chatbot’s advice turns into an ad for a dating site that aims to connect young men with older women. “Ads come to AI,” reads the tagline. “But not Claude.
As OpenAI’s market share has declined in recent months, Anthropic has created a media frenzy over its allegedly “too powerful to release” Claude Mythos system and its decision to file for its own initial public offering. If OpenAI proves unable to convert new users in droves, it may become to AI what Netscape was to web browsers or Myspace was to social media.
“That brings us back to the ad campaign,” Rothenberg said. “OpenAI created a market and is most at risk of losing the market it created. They’re saying, ‘Hey, we’re not scary. Come to us’.”