The work of an impish employment agency specializing in construction tech jobs in Belgium, of all places, succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. The billboards were only up for 9 days (June 1 to June 19), but it was a spark that lit a flame, adding to a raging controversy in the tech world, which is once again having to account for how AI is going to, at best, eat the jobs of humans and, worst, end humanity altogether. Of course, the AI community took umbrage with the IMPACT campaign and threw up its usual defenses, including variations of “You don’t get it,” “we’re here to help … not harm” and “you’re not losing a job, you are being liberated from a job that is beneath your dignity.”
Pictures of IMPACT’s “Hey, ChatGPT, finish this building” message went viral. The company’s website was often inaccessible for a large part of this writing.
The campaign has been a solid success for IMPACT. It has resulted in 6 times the number of applications it usually gets for construction jobs. The campaign has excited all the advertising and media covering AI—the spark in Antwerp that put all of AI’s champions on their back feet and even got the attention of the venerable New York Times. As of 2 months ago, pictures of the Hey, ChatGPT billboards generated over 150 million views, 800 thousand of which were shared on social media. IMPACT had a 10-fold increase in the number of visits to its website.
The “Hey, ChatGPT” campaign may be the proud work of Isabelle Dumortier, director of marketing and culture at IMPACT, who asks on LinkedIn, “Hey, ChatGPT, can you fetch us some awards, please. Or make it three?”
IMPACT has won 3 BOA awards already:
- Silver for ‘Small Budget Campaign’
- Bronze for ‘B2B Communication’
- Another silver for ‘Creative’
At three recent conferences (Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure, Trimble Dimensions, Autodesk University), which seemed to provide opportunities for each company to insist that they are AI leaders. You wonder if they want to be known now as AI companies and not software vendors. It is a phenonium unseen since the height of the dot com boom when every company sought to be seen as an Internet company. Some were to change their names to include dot com. [Oops, that was us]. You might expect that the “Hey, ChatGPT, finish my building” campaign would be common knowledge, a talking point, with all executives briefed on how to respond to impertinent questions about it … but none seemed to have any knowledge of it, as if the cleverest expression of dissent was not allowed to enter their world.