Is their product good enough to back their hype? Probably not. Most of these "customer service" systems are only slightly smarter than "Press 1 to pay your bill, press 2 if your item hasn't arrived..." menu systems.<p>Edit: It's worse than I thought. It's a spamming system.<p><i>Artisan Is The Only Outbound Tool Your Team Needs</i><p><i>Ava operates within Artisan Sales, our platform that has everything you need for cold outbound. B2B data, warmup, automated lead research, bounce testing, deliverability checks and so much more.</i><p>Like most chatbot companies, their own sales effort does not use their own chatbot. When you go to their site, you don't get to talk to their chatbot about their product.
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1h4l8df/comment/m01c3v3/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1h4l8df/comme...</a><p>> I used this “AI” for my company about 6 months ago.<p>> We had to cancel after only two months because it kept making things up that weren’t easily checked. Ex. I noticed your company recently bought xx I think that was a savvy move<p>> Cue people asking me what I was referring to, where they could find an article, etc<p>> These unanswerable questions were all the responses I ever got back. The effective response rate was 0%. So not only was it not producing it was also actively hurting the brand with all the nonsensical comments.
Remember that Y Combinator frequently brags they don’t back ideas, they back founders. Meaning this is the type of asshole they think is a good bet. Another one whose best idea they could come up with was yet another shitty chatbot. Because that’s all Y Combinator seems to back these days: “something something AI”.
If you want to double-down on the sketchiness of selling robo-plagiarism of human authors' creations, to put humans out of work, call it "Artisans".<p>We all know that a bunch of people are getting rich off massive copyright violation, and anyone who understands how sketchy it is would rather be one of the people getting rich, than to martyr themselves pointlessly in front of this freight train of thieving greed.<p>But go and call it "Artisans", just to add insult to world-crushing injury.
So this is a clear case of this, right? <a href="https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow">https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html</a><p>(No shade to the company, good on them for getting coverage!)
> The company, which is backed by startup accelerator Y-Combinator, sells what it calls “AI Employees” or “Artisans.” What the company actually sells is software designed to assist with customer service and sales workflow.<p>More fancy chat AI bots.
"Humans Need Not Apply", as CGP Grey titled one of his videos.<p>For the moment, it is not so; for the moment, AI needs a human around to prevent catastrophic mistakes.<p>When it no longer needs that help, <i>then</i> humans need no longer apply.<p>> "Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance" "Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never ‘not be working’ today." "Hire Artisans, not humans." "The era of AI employees is here." Yes, grim stuff. At first glance, you might wonder who the target audience for these billboards is. After all, the billboards will mostly be viewed by humans, and, as far as can be discerned, most humans enjoy being employed.<p>Do we? I rather had the impression most of us like <i>money</i>, and the work is just the means to get that money?
> <i>After all, the billboards will mostly be viewed by humans, and, as far as can be discerned, most humans enjoy being employed.</i><p>Gizmodo isn't exactly as far away from Artisan's mindset as they'd like to be if they think the reason people want jobs is <i>enjoyment</i>.
> <i>“They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI,” the CEO told the outlet, of the ads. “The way the world works is changing.”</i><p>How exactly are they positioning themselves here? Being pro-dystopia?
What all these AI crazies forget is that they're building a world with no customers.
If no stupid humans have jobs no stupid humans won't have money to buy whatever these Magical AI companies are selling.<p>Hint: AI doesn't buy AI.<p>Good luck to us all
“… What if we burn all our funding to create a shocking antisocial marketing campaign that gets the press to talk about our unknown startup, because the air is already saturated with breathless AI hype”
Tell me you haven't been out of the Bay Area in a long time without telling me you haven't been out of the Bay Area in a long time. What a tone-deaf campaign.