#advertising-ethics

#advertising-ethics

Mrinank Sharma announced his resignation from Anthropic in an open letter to his colleagues on Monday. Sharma, who has served on the company's technical staff since 2023, first noted that he "achieved what I wanted to here" and is "especially proud of my recent efforts to help us live our values via internal transparency mechanisms; and also my final project on understanding how AI assistants could make us less human or distort our humanity."

In the Super Bowl ad for Amazon's Alexa+ AI assistant, Chris Hemsworth fears that the AI is trying to kill him. Perhaps it will trigger a rogue garage door, or close the pool cover while he is out for a swim. Ultimately, of course, he learns that the AI just wants him to be happy, offering a massage to relieve his tension. As it happens, AI anxiety seems to be running high, and the Super Bowl is poised to become the center of that conversation.

Almost a decade ago I decided to quit my well-paid job in advertising in order to pursue a precarious career in freelance journalism. The merits of that decision are up for debate but the real stupidity is in how I quit my job: I wrote a rather cringeworthy column for the Guardian about my meaningless job in advertising and publicly proclaimed that I'd decided to quit.

The ad begins with a voiceover saying, "To those who might scratch day and night. To those whose skin will feel dried out even by water," alongside extreme visuals of scratched and cracked Black skin. "Try to take a shower with the new Sanex skin therapy," the ad continues, cutting to visuals of a White woman showering (sans bodily ailments), "Relief could be as simple as a shower," it concludes.