What Do San Francisco’s ‘AI vs. Humans’ Billboards Say About Our Working Futures?

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence has taken over the Bay Area’s advertising space. Buildings, bus shelters and billboards lining Highway 101 have become unofficial chroniclers of the region’s AI boom.

The ads are peppered with Silicon Valley speak— SaaS! SOC 2! Vibe coding! — to woo a select few potential employees, clients or investors. But for everyone who isn’t working in tech, the billboards are an opaque window into an industry that isn’t speaking to them at all.

“So much of AI right here in the Bay, but it feels like a whole separate world,” said Angélica Castro, a community health worker living in San Francisco, on her way to a class at City College of San Francisco. “When you do see AI, it’s on billboards. And they make you feel like you’re some sort of problem for being a human.”

The anti-human sentiment dates back to a 2024 campaign by San Francisco-based Artisan AI featuring the message, “Stop hiring humans.”

Company leadership did not respond to an interview request from KQED, but CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack said in a 2025 interview with the San Francisco Standard that the billboards were, in fact, deliberate ragebait, designed to spark outrage and angry online chatter to boost the company’s visibility.

Artisan’s ads are now mostly gone, but the fear and anxiety they provoked have taken hold. According to a 2025 Reuters/Ipsos poll, more than 70% of adults surveyed fear that AI will be “putting too many people out of work permanently.” Recent news that Bay Area companies like Pinterest and Block are conducting massive layoffs as they automate work with AI continues to stoke these anxieties.

Many billboards now feature ad campaigns that argue AI will empower rather than replace humans. The backlash against “Stop hiring humans” has brought us “Stop firing humans.” But shifting public perception about AI’s human impact will require more than a change in advertising, as skeptics call for worker protections and regulations to prevent large-scale displacement.

Zig and zag

When the billboards for Artisan AI first went up, David McGrane, advertising professor at the University of San Francisco, remembers how his students reacted. “They were enraged,” he said, adding that many of them felt frustrated seeing this message displayed so publicly when they themselves were starting to look for jobs.

“Trying to attract attention by being obnoxious — that’s been done in advertising for a century. That’s nothing new,” he said.

But the approach opened an opportunity for other companies, he said. “They saw the ragebait,” he said. “They saw they could explain that their AI works well when it works with humans. ‘If they’re zigging, we will zag.’”

That’s exactly what Abby Connect did. The Las Vegas-based virtual receptionist service unveiled an AI-powered offering last year that takes over some administrative tasks that its human receptionists usually do. After a visit to San Francisco, CEO Nathan Strum wanted to promote it on Silicon Valley’s own turf.

“We couldn’t come in with your typical message, ‘Hi, we’re an answering service, call us and set up an appointment to learn more,’” Strum said. He wanted to respond directly to the Artisan campaign, he said. “Something triggered me when I saw that — something deep down.”

Soon, Abby ads that read, “Humanity: Stop firing humans,” appeared on Muni bus shelters all over the city. While Abby’s AI schedules appointments, it’s a human that still handles the more complicated calls — like someone calling their dentist about a toothache.

“I love human service, and I love AI. I don’t have to be one or the other,” Strum said.

Abby’s not the only one with a campaign that pushes back against automation fears. San Francisco-based firm Nooks pitched its message with a pair of billboards along 101 that read “AI won’t take your job …” and “But someone using Nooks will!”

“We are playing into the topical, ‘How does AI change hiring and jobs?” said CEO Daniel Lee, who started Nooks with fellow Stanford University students during the pandemic. The company sells software that automates parts of a salesperson’s job — like researching clients or following up on emails.

“Sales is human, and sales reps will continue selling in the future,” Lee said, and compared sales to a game of chess. “We’re playing the game alongside you, helping you think a lot less about manually making the moves and a lot more about the strategy and solving customer problems.”

Linear, a San Francisco-based company, took one of the most recognizable images in Western civilization — Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam — and instead of God reaching towards Adam, God’s hand now approaches a cluster of tiny cursor hands. Below, a message reads, “Agents. At your command.”

The company wanted to stay away from any message that suggested AI is replacing humans, COO Cristina Cordova said. Linear produces software for engineers and designers to work together on projects, and includes “agents” — virtual workers that do a lot of the coding themselves.

The billboards — like Linear’s product — are not meant for everyone, Cordova said. But she’s optimistic about a future where more people can build their own software when AI can deal with complex code.

“We want to position human beings as the source of intent, the decision makers, the ones who have taste and judgment,” Cordova said. Echoing her company’s Sistine Chapel-coded billboards, she said. “The human role is almost divine.”

Who regulates AI workers?

At a recent industry conference in New Delhi, OpenAI and ChatGPT chief Sam Altman told the press that automation has eliminated jobs multiple times in history. But it’s also created entirely new industries, he said. “We always find new things to do, and I have no doubt we will find lots of better ones this time.”

But there’s no guarantee that humans whose jobs are automated will actually find a new livelihood, said UC Los Angeles professor Ramesh Srinivasan, who studies the connections between technology and democracy.

“Where are the jobs and what are they going to look like?” he said. Without a clear picture of how humans will add value to the work AI takes up, he said. “What’s on the chopping block is the social contract where people are compensated for their labor.”

Srinivasan said the gig economy — rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft, for example — show how, without enough government oversight, tech innovations that promised to give workers more freedom actually create more precarious conditions.

During California’s 2020 election, Uber and other gig companies spent more than $200 million backing Proposition 22, a ballot measure allowing them to classify drivers as independent contractors rather than employees — exempting them from state labor protections such as minimum wage, overtime pay, and workers’ compensation. While backers of Proposition 22 promised the initiative would guarantee minimum earnings, many ride-hail drivers say their real wages have slipped.

“The direction tech has taken has become an amplifier of inequality, but it certainly doesn’t need to be that way,” Srinivasan said. He’s skeptical that President Donald Trump and his administration will set up guardrails to prevent widespread AI automation and points to the close relationship OpenAI and other tech giants have developed with the White House.

“If regulators have been captured by the technology industry, then you don’t have much recourse,” he said. “The point of regulation isn’t to stop technology innovation, but to direct it in a way that supports multiple stakeholders rather than just a few investors.”

California lawmakers and labor groups are pushing forward legislation in response to AI automation. Last month, state Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes, D-San Bernardino, introduced SB 951, which would require employers to notify workers and state officials at least 90 days in advance before any “technological displacement” — layoffs caused “by the introduction of an AI system or other automated technology.”

The California Labor Federation — which represents over 2.3 million workers — supports the bill. “We need data on which jobs and industries are impacted by AI layoffs and hiring freezes and what tools are being used to replace workers,” said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Labor Federation.

Whether the AI industry can keep that promised balance between human and machine in the workforce may not matter much for Bay Area residents already struggling in the existing job market.

Ian Molloy, a paraeducator at a San Francisco public school, said he sees the billboard advertisements for AI every single day. “You see them and feel this existential dread about this whole block of AI,” he said.

Molloy participated in February’s four-day teacher strike that included demands for family health care and wage increases. He said the topic of billboards in the city came up on the picket line.

“A lot of San Francisco is marketed towards a very small portion of San Francisco,” he said, adding that the future these billboards promise impacts everyone in the city — regardless of whether they are the target audience or not.

“I wish we lived in a world where if AI took your job, you would not starve, not be homeless,” he said.

“But the reality is we don’t have a good enough social safety net.”