In a move that marketing professor Scott Galloway is calling a “seminal moment” in the AI wars, Anthropic used a Super Bowl commercial to take a direct shot at market leader OpenAI, successfully getting under the skin of CEO Sam Altman. The advertisement, which claims, “Ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude,” capitalizes on recent news that OpenAI is testing advertisements on ChatGPT. According to Galloway, the ad’s effectiveness lies not just in its humor, but in its recognition of the dominant, unspoken use case for artificial intelligence: therapy.
During a recent segment of the Prof G Markets podcast with cohost Ed Elson, Galloway said that what Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei understands—and what makes this ad so vicious and so effective—is that while corporations discuss AI as a productivity enhancer, the reality of user behavior is far more intimate.
The top use case for AI is, in fact, “therapy,” according to Galloway, and “people are revealing their most intimate questions and concerns to AI.” (That is the setup for the Anthropic commercial.)
Jess Ramos, founder of Big Data Energy Analytics, declared on LinkedIn that it was the most thought-provoking Super Bowl ad of the year and that it “obliterated ChatGPT” by poking fun at how many people use it for therapy and validation. Then it “ended with a smackdown of what they think ads will look like in ChatGPT: abruptly interrupted conversation with insensitive ad placements.”
