Companies spent over $1.7 billion on AI advertising, with major campaigns during the Super Bowl. Photo / Getty Images

Americans are using artificial intelligence apps more but surveys show they doubt the technology is good for them or the world. A growing number of their elected officials are moving to restrict the industry.

Companies are trying to exorcise the bad vibes and spent more than $1.7 billion on AI-related
advertising last year – an ongoing marketing blitz that will be inescapable during Sunday’s Super Bowl.

OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, is planning its second Super Bowl TV commercial, the Wall Street Journal reported. Anthropic, which offers the Claude chatbot, will counter with ads that mock ChatGPT. Movie star Chris Hemsworth will imagine Amazon’s Alexa+ AI assistant murdering him. And Google will air a tearjerker commercial for its Gemini chatbot. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Commercial breaks in America’s biggest yearly TV gathering have previously provided a marketing launchpad for new technologies, including cryptocurrencies, electric vehicles and dot-com startups. The Super Bowl ads are a high-stakes pitch to win new fans and become enmeshed in American life. But the AI industry faces a special challenge, because it’s selling a vision of the future that Americans don’t like.

“The reason they’re having to advertise is reputation management because people are nervous” about AI, said Eric Wilson, who advises Republicans on digital strategies. These ads come loaded with weighty baggage. “It’s a lot like if Coca-Cola went onto the market and immediately jumped into a huge policy debate about the future of humanity,” Wilson said.

The Washington Post asked experts in marketing and political campaign messaging to analyse four AI TV commercials set to air during this year’s Super Bowl or that appeared in recent months to see how the messages are trying to win over an AI-sceptical public. The campaigns tout how AI might improve a young man’s love life, help a mother and son decorate their new home or preserve jobs in small-town America.

The pitch: In the Google Super Bowl ad, a mother and young son use its Gemini chatbot to visualise what his room and their garden could look like in a new home they’re moving into.

Does the message work? Advertising and brand messaging experts raved about several Google advertisements in the past year that pitch its AI as helping people clarify what matters in their lives and work. Most featured parents and children and hit viewers over the head with warm-and-fuzzies.

Angeli Gianchandani, a New York University adjunct professor who specialises in brand strategy and communications, said it’s smart for Google to pitch AI that offers “reassurance” and emotional connection rather than just practical capabilities. “The next era of AI marketing will not be won by showing what machines can do, but by clarifying what humans still own,” she said.