What San Francisco’s AI Billboards Reveal About the Future of Human Work
Artificial intelligence has become part of the urban landscape in San Francisco. Anyone walking the city streets, riding the Muni, or driving along Highway 101 already knows what to expect: billboards, bus shelters, and building facades taken over by ads from AI companies, each one making a different promise about the future of work.
The problem is that this whole conversation wasn’t made for everyone.
Most of these messages are packed with technical jargon — SaaS, SOC 2, vibe coding — aimed at a very specific crowd: investors, corporate clients, and tech professionals. For people outside that world, the billboards work more like a closed window into an industry that simply isn’t talking to them.
And that brings up the question that really stings: what happens when the message you read every day on your way to work suggests that you, as a human being, are the problem to be solved?
Angélica Castro, a community health worker who lives in San Francisco, summed up that feeling well. On her way to a class at City College of San Francisco, she said that while AI is everywhere in the Bay Area, it feels like a completely separate world. When you see AI, it’s on the billboards, she said. And they make you feel like you’re some kind of problem for being human.
That was exactly the sentiment an ad campaign stirred up in 2024, sparking a debate that goes far beyond graphic design and catchy slogans. The fear of technological unemployment left the realm of academic discussions and landed, quite literally, on the streets. 🏙️
The Campaign That Lit the Fuse
In 2024, artificial intelligence company Artisan AI, based in San Francisco, launched a series of ads across the city with phrases that quickly went viral on social media. Among the messages plastered on billboards, one stood out in particular: Stop Hiring Humans. The slogan was direct, provocative, and for a lot of people, deeply unsettling.
The backlash was immediate. San Francisco residents, workers, and even tech insiders took to social media to express discomfort with the campaign’s tone. But that was exactly what Artisan intended. The company’s CEO, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, admitted in a 2025 interview with the San Francisco Standard that the billboards were deliberately designed as ragebait — content crafted to generate anger and online discussion, boosting the brand’s visibility.
And it worked, at least in terms of reach. The strategy triggered a flood of furious comments on Reddit and other platforms. But the side effect was ripping open a wound many people had been carrying in silence: the very real anxiety about what intelligent automation is going to do to the jobs that exist today.
For a significant number of people, seeing that phrase on a billboard during their commute wasn’t just impactful from a creative standpoint. It was a clear statement of intent about where this industry is headed and who it’s willing to leave behind in the process. 😬
David McGrane, a professor of advertising at the University of San Francisco, remembers his students’ reaction well when the billboards first appeared. They were furious, he said, adding that many were just starting their job searches and felt frustrated seeing that message displayed so publicly.
For McGrane, trying to grab attention by being obnoxious is a tactic that’s been around in advertising for over a century. Nothing new. But he acknowledges the campaign opened a strategic opportunity for other companies to position their messaging differently.
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The Counter-Attack: From Provocation to Empathy
With the Artisan controversy dominating the conversation, other companies spotted an opening to take the opposite stance. If Artisan was zigging, as McGrane put it, they decided to zag. The logic was simple: show that artificial intelligence can work alongside humans, not in place of them.
One of the most striking examples came from Abby Connect, a virtual receptionist company based in Las Vegas. Last year, the company launched an AI tool that automates some of the administrative tasks normally handled by their human receptionists. After a visit to San Francisco, CEO Nathan Strum decided to promote the product right in Silicon Valley’s backyard.
Strum knew he couldn’t show up with a standard message like we’re an answering service, call for more info. He wanted to respond directly to Artisan’s campaign. Something hit me when I saw that billboard, something deep down, he said.
Before long, Abby ads featuring the phrase Humanity: Stop Firing Humans started popping up on Muni bus shelters throughout the city. The idea was clear: Abby’s AI handles scheduling, but when a call gets more complex — like someone calling the dentist with a toothache — a human takes over the conversation.
I love human service and I love AI. I don’t need to choose one or the other, Strum summed up.
Another company that jumped into this narrative battle was Nooks, based in San Francisco. Founded by Stanford students during the pandemic, the company placed a pair of billboards along Highway 101 with a two-part message: AI won’t take your job… followed by But someone using Nooks will!
CEO Daniel Lee explained that the company sells software that automates parts of a salesperson’s job, like researching clients or following up on emails. But he’s adamant that sales will remain an essentially human activity. Lee compared the dynamic to a chess game, where AI plays alongside you, helping you think less about the manual moves and more about the strategy for solving the client’s problems.
The Sistine Chapel Reference
Perhaps the most creative approach came from Linear, a San Francisco company that makes software for engineers and designers to collaborate on projects. The company took one of the most recognizable images in Western civilization — Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — and gave it a tech twist. Instead of God reaching out to Adam, the divine hand now extends toward a cluster of small mouse cursors. Below it, the message: Agents. At your command.
Linear’s COO, Cristina Cordova, explained that the company wanted to distance itself from any notion that AI is replacing humans. Linear’s virtual agents handle a good chunk of the coding, but Cordova emphasizes that the human role is to be the source of intent, the decision-maker, the one with good taste and judgment. Echoing the Sistine Chapel reference on the billboards, she was direct: the human role is almost divine.
San Francisco at the Epicenter of the Tension
San Francisco isn’t just a city where tech companies have offices. It’s the living symbol of everything the tech industry represents, with all its contrasts, promises, and contradictions. It’s the city that mints billionaires and where the housing crisis has turned sidewalks into permanent encampments. It’s the place that talks about democratizing access to technology while rents push low-income workers farther and farther from the city center.
This context matters a lot when trying to understand why AI billboards hit so hard in this particular city. The local population has been living for years with the direct effects of gentrification driven by tech company growth. Many long-time residents have been displaced. Traditional businesses have closed. And now, the same industry that reshaped the city is announcing, in giant letters, that humans might be replaceable in their professional roles.
For the people caught in the middle of all this, the message isn’t abstract. It’s very concrete and very close to home. 🌉
Technological Unemployment Has Left the Drawing Board
For a long time, the discussion about unemployment caused by automation was confined to consulting firm reports and panels at tech conferences. The numbers varied, predictions swung between optimistic and catastrophic, but it all felt distant. What San Francisco’s billboards did was bring that discussion into the present.
Recent data shows the concern is far from unfounded. According to a 2025 Reuters/Ipsos survey, more than 70% of American adults polled fear that AI is pushing too many people out of the workforce permanently. And that fear doesn’t come from nowhere. Bay Area companies like Pinterest and Block have announced mass layoffs recently while automating roles with artificial intelligence.
What makes the current scenario different from previous waves of automation is the speed and the scope of what’s happening. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, argued at a recent conference in New Delhi that automation has eliminated jobs many times throughout history but has also created entirely new industries. We always found new things to do, and I have no doubt we’ll find many better ones this time, he said.
But not everyone shares that optimism.
The Skeptics’ View
Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who studies the connections between technology and democracy, directly questions the assumption that new jobs will simply emerge. Where are those jobs and what are they going to look like? he asked. Without a clear vision of how humans will add value to the work AI takes on, what’s at stake is the social contract in which people are compensated for their labor.
Srinivasan uses the gig economy as an example to illustrate his point. Ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft promised to give workers more freedom, but in practice created more precarious conditions. During the 2020 California election, Uber and other gig companies invested more than 200 million dollars in Proposition 22, a measure that allowed classifying drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, exempting them from labor protections like minimum wage, overtime, and workers’ compensation. While the measure promised to guarantee minimum earnings, many drivers report that their actual pay has decreased since then.
The direction technology has taken has become an amplifier of inequality, but it certainly doesn’t have to be that way, Srinivasan argued. He’s also skeptical about the federal government, under the Trump administration, establishing protections against widespread AI automation, pointing to the close relationship OpenAI and other tech giants have developed with the White House.
If the regulators have been captured by the tech industry, then you don’t have many avenues, he said. The goal of regulation is not to slow down technological innovation but to steer it in a way that supports multiple stakeholders, not just a handful of investors. 📊
Legislation and Worker Protections
While the debate over billboards and narratives grabs headlines, concrete actions are starting to take shape on the legislative front. California lawmakers and labor groups are pushing bills in response to AI-driven automation.
Last month, state Senator Eloise Gómez Reyes, a Democrat from San Bernardino, introduced SB 951. The bill would require employers to notify workers and state authorities at least 90 days in advance before any technological displacement — meaning layoffs caused by the introduction of an AI system or other automated technology.
The California Labor Federation, which represents more than 2.3 million workers, backs the bill. Lorena Gonzalez, the federation’s president, was emphatic: we need data on which jobs and industries are being impacted by AI-related layoffs and hiring freezes, and what tools are being used to replace workers.
This kind of legislation could be an important first step toward creating a protection framework that keeps pace with how fast AI is transforming the labor market. But its passage and implementation still face significant pushback from the tech industry.
Who Feels the Impact Firsthand
Whether the promised balance between human and machine will actually materialize might not matter much to Bay Area residents who are already struggling in today’s job market.
Ian Molloy, a paraeducator at a San Francisco public school, said he sees the AI ads every day. You see that and feel this existential dread about this whole AI block, he vented. Molloy took part in the four-day teachers’ strike in February, which included demands for family health coverage and salary increases. According to him, the topic of the city’s billboards even came up on the picket line.
A lot of San Francisco is directed at a very small portion of San Francisco, he observed, adding that the future these billboards promise impacts everyone in the city, whether or not they’re the target audience.
I wish we lived in a world where, if AI took your job, you wouldn’t starve, you wouldn’t become homeless, Molloy said. But the reality is we don’t have a good enough social safety net.
What Stays After the Billboard Comes Down
Ad campaigns come and go. The billboards get swapped out, media contracts expire, and new ads take the place of old ones. But the feeling a message stirs in the people who see it every day doesn’t fade as easily. What the Artisan campaign and so many other artificial intelligence ads scattered across San Francisco left behind is a conversation the tech industry will need to face more honestly and inclusively.
Talking about the future of work only to investors and executives is a strategy with an expiration date. As AI tools move beyond corporate environments and get closer to the everyday lives of ordinary people, the narrative that accompanies their arrival needs to evolve too. It’s not about hiding the impacts or painting an artificially rosy picture. It’s about placing at the center of the conversation the very people who will feel those impacts in practice: the workers, families, and communities that depend on jobs being redefined in real time.
The chain reaction sparked by Artisan’s Stop Hiring Humans led to Abby Connect’s Stop Firing Humans, passed through the more nuanced billboards from Linear and Nooks, and reached the halls of the California legislature. That sequence shows the debate over AI and employment has already moved past the slogan phase and entered the territory of public policy and real protections.
San Francisco remains the stage where this story plays out most visibly. The billboards are still there, the companies keep growing, and the debates keep happening — on social media, in Mission District bars, and in the hallways of SoMa tech offices. What’s changed is that technological unemployment has stopped being a distant threat and become a conversation for today, written in big letters, at eye level for anyone walking down the street.
And ignoring it, at this point, is no longer an option for anyone. 💡
