People hate AI, but they love using it . Here's to Super Bowl ads

· 4 min read · Technology
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People hate AI

People don’t like Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence spreads fear and worries about Jobs and the future.

What people do like though is what AI does, how it helps them. They love interacting with Artificial Intelligence, using ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, but they hate that it exists.

And ads for AI companies should reflect exactly that. They need to show how people can do more, learn faster, build higher, discover more, and push the world forwards by using such tools.

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That’s why the Keep thinking campaign by Anthropic is so good. It reflects exactly that.

On the other hand, the ChatGPT Super Bowl ad of 2025 is the exact contrary. It’s cold, mechanical and connects discovering fire with Artificial Intelligence? That’s what scares people, the loss of human interaction.

And OpenAI noticed. Their next ad series was brilliant. It shows how people use ChatGPT in different situations, how it helps them. It’s personal connection and a real story.

I have mixed feelings about Anthropic’s viral Super Bowl campaign against (OpenAI) Ads in Chatbots. They are humorous and people can relate to the way AI talks to them. And yes, all of a sudden Mom and Dad knew about Claude, we talked about the company, just because of this ad series. In that sense, mission accomplished.

But again, this is Super Bowl. The average Super Bowl viewer doesn’t know that Ads are coming to ChatGPT, so all they remember is weirdly talking human (robots) with ads in them, and the Claude logo at the end. The ads work for the tech bubble, but not for the general public. It’s a missed opportunity to tell an inspiring story. There is that perspective. And nobody will install Claude because of that ad, nobody will feel inspired. People see get a weird feeling about the brand, and not understand a thing.

These ads are both

  1. Not suitable for Super Bowl, only for us, the tech bubble
  2. A few months too early. Nobody has seen ads in ChatGPT yet, so nobody understands what issue it is they are promoting.

Either way, here you go:

While Anthropic’s ads never mention OpenAI, it’s clear who they mean. And Sam Altman answered directly to this, confronting Anthropic and saying, that ChatGPT ads don’t work the way they are portrayed in those ads (although they do).

I’m not reading all this. If you need a giant wordsalad after your competition hits you with a humorous ad, they outmaneuvered you.

Benjamin De Kraker, @BenjaminDEKR

Touching stories are what connects people with technology. And there is not better technology to tell a touching story about than Large Language Models.

Update

OpenAI’s “with ChatGPT” ads are beautiful, and exactly what I meant with telling a touching story. They show how different people use AI. They give a person who’s watching and hasn’t used ChatGPT inspiration and ideas what to use it for. Those ads are trying to drive new users who haven’t touched LLMs at all, instead of bringing people to another service. It’s positive, inspiring, targeting exactly the viewer himself (the three different spots were chosen location wise), and they are simply showing the future.

That’s how an AI spot should look like. Because it is about using AI, and not AI itself. Remember, people don’t like AI, but they love using it.

Update

Turns out surveys after Super Bowl show exactly what I had thought about the Claude ads. Let me cite adweek.com

“The vast majority of consumers don’t know what Claude is. Many people aren’t going to really get the whole ‘Oh, we’re comparing ourselves to chatGPT,’” said Williamson.

Early audience response suggested the message struggled to land. According to an iSpot survey of 500 viewers, the ad’s likeability score placed it in the bottom 3% compared with Super Bowl ads over the past five years. Its top-two-box purchase intent scored 24% below Super Bowl norms and 19% below ads in its category that aired over the last 90 days. Viewers most commonly described their reaction as “WTF,” signaling confusion around both the message and the execution.

“Claude’s ad has done a good job of stoking conversations and controversy online, but the ad does not test well among general population audiences with confusion around the message and execution,” said Sammi Scharninghausen, brand analyst at iSpot. “WTF is a common emotional signal for the AI category in general, so these companies need to work hard at delivering a clear message and strong storytelling that ties to the brand in order to connect with broad audiences”.

But I am going to repeat myself, mission accomplished in the sense that Mom and Dad now know Claude exists. That thousands of influencers on the web talked about Claude, including people like Scott Galloway. But again, no normalo saw the ad at Super Bowl and installed Claude. No one.