Peaches and rAInbows!

Meta’s new ad is a Lisa Frank wet dream. There are rainbows, butterflies, bear hugs, and smash-cuts between three grinning children.

It’s a smiley, cloying vision for AI. The ad’s narrator beckons us to call Meta’s staff “optimists” and “dreamers,” and says that the company is “betting on people” — tell that to the 8,000 workers Meta just laid off. It promises that the “future is for everyone” — a surprisingly collectivist mission for a company that has recently hired several acolytes of Donald Trump.

While Meta turns up the cheer on AI, the American public has soured. 40% of Americans predict that AI will have a negative impact on society, according to Pew Research Center; only 16% said it would be positive. Nearly three-quarters of Americans are opposed to data centers being built in their area, per Gallup. Protests abound, on TikTok, at City Halls, and outside Anthropic’s headquarters.

Meta clearly has something to prove — as do all the AI labs. As executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and beyond change their tone from “AI could wipe out white-collar work” to “AI will be an immaculate boon for humanity,” the industry’s power players have gone on the defensive.

AI is great, they say. We’re leading it with joy and conscientiousness, they say. Trust us, they say.

AI is a unique marketing challenge. A few years ago, it was described as all-powerful — the technological shift to end all technological shifts. It was “even bigger” than a technological revolution, Sam Altman said four months after ChatGPT’s launch. Dario Amodei analogized LLMs to a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.”

Then there was the productivity wave, promising workers that it would make their jobs so much easier. If you believe Elon Musk, you might not need to work at all. And then there’s always China, the looming threat the labs can cite to justify their breakneck speed.

The China warnings aren’t going away anytime soon. For all the giddiness of the Meta ad, Sean Spicer reacted with a dour warning. “The US can’t lose the AI race to China,” the former White House press secretary and onetime “Dancing With The Stars” contestant wrote in a quote tweet of the ad. I emailed Spicer to ask for his thoughts on the ad and what he thought it said about public opinion. He ignored the question. “There is no second place in the race to dominate AI,” he wrote.

That’s what the AI race has long been about: domination. The labs have tried to dominate in pricing, in talent, in subtle digs on the podcast circuit. Can they soften their image to regain trust?

Anthropic tried with its own barnburner of an ad that it debuted during the World Cup two weeks ago. It showed some terrifying images — facial recognition tracking, a cemetery, and yes, a burning house — while posing some terrifying questions. “Can AI be trusted?” a voiceover asked. “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?” The answer: Anthropic! We here for you.

If the ads prove anything, it’s that the AI labs realize how deep the worries have gone.

The ad was widely skewered. Andreessen Horowitz partner Olivia Moore wondered if Anthropic was “actively trying to churn users.” Sam Altman wrote that he thought it was satire. And yet, its structure was remarkably similar to the Meta ad in one way: teeing up the criticism, then shutting it down.

Anthropic gives its critics a pat on the head. “If we all had a voice in it, then I feel like it would be better,” one voice in the ad says, implying that the public has a voice in Anthropic’s development. They don’t; it’s not even a public company yet. The startup’s message that there’s “hope in hard questions” doesn’t offer any plans for answering them.

Meta, on the other hand, gives its critics the business. “Some people will have you believe AI will make us less connected,” the ad’s narrator says. “Have you believe” — what is this, hypnosis? Of course, Meta is the savior against these faceless snake-charmers. They’re the optimists, the shining knights of the AI race.

It’s not just the LLM giants. Notion played into the criticism in its latest campaign: “AI dread” billboards. The software company set up a hotline for callers with a “nagging worry that AI can do our jobs.”

Trust is hard to earn. It’s not clear that either strategy — the head-pat, the retort — will bring AI’s detractors any peace.

Some commenters loved the Meta ad, calling it a solve for growing doomerism. Others called called it “distasteful” and “unbelievably out of touch.” Many mocked the score choice: David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a song about the demise of planet Earth.

David Reibstein, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said that the AI labs had to address growing criticism. Anthropic’s ad was “gutsy,” he said, while he was less inspired by Meta’s. The message is “trust us because we’re Facebook,” he said. On the criticism that Anthropic raised potential harms that the company itself was abetting those potential harms, he said, “I don’t think it’s being hypocritical. I think it’s being sensitive.”

When reached for comment, a Meta representative sent contact information for some advertising executives it said the company had no financial ties to. One of these was Zach Blume, president of the creative agency Portal A, who said he found both ads “powerful and persuasive.”

I also asked Joonas Virtanen, a founding designer at the mini-app startup Wabi who had previously helped make Airbnb’s chatbots “more fun,” what he made of the campaigns. He said that he was more likely to believe Anthropic’s approach, calling it an “honest” ad that “treats people like adults.” As for Meta, he spat out the sugary sweetness. “It’s a little bit of corporate bullshit,” he said. “It is selling that rosy vision.”

Virtanen works in tech; he’s predisposed to AI’s benefits. The companies will need to bring in those outside the bubble, those who would rather live near a nuclear reactor than a data center. They’ll be harder to convince.

Sure, Amodei has tapered down his warnings of the oncoming AI apocalypse. And sure, Altman said he’d be “delighted to be wrong” about AI job destruction. But the seed is already planted. If the ads prove anything, it’s that the AI labs realize how deep the worries have gone. They’ll need more than rainbows and “hard questions” to uproot it.

Henry Chandonnet is a reporter on the Business News desk. He mainly writes about AI and tech culture.