Viral ad shows future where tech bros want human sweat to power AI

A spoof advert features prominent tech leaders in the near future who claim that breaking a sweat can help people find purpose after machines took away their jobs en masse.

The documentary-style ad opens with visibly aged Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, who says that almost 80% of people had lost their jobs by 2030.

“They had no money, no purpose, but they had a lot of time on their hands,” Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos adds.

The ad, created by Belgian AI company AiCandy, then shows dozens of people on bikes at the gym called “Energym.”

“The less people actually did physical work, the more they wanted to appear as if they did,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, then goes on explaining.

The satirical ad claims that human-generated energy now powers the machines that took away their jobs. The fake Altman states that it solved not only AI companies’ energy needs, but also people’s need for purpose.

The spoof ad comes days after Altman provoked intense backlash for comparing the energy used to train AI to the resources needed to raise a human.

“It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart,” Altman said, speaking at an event hosted by the Indian Express.

The ad may have been inspired by an episode of Black Mirror, a British-American dystopian series.

The episode, titled Fifteen Million Merits, takes us to an unidentifiable place where humans spend their days peddling Peloton-type bikes to power the world’s electricity and earn merits which they can spend on entertainment.

Shared on AiCandy’s Instagram account, the ad garnered over 107,000 likes and was reshared multiple times on X.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy reposted the video by saying that it “doesn't feel like a parody of anything.”

A typical AI-focused data center consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households, according to the International Energy Agency. Global data center electricity consumption is set to more than double by 2030.

While evidence on mass job replacement is conflicting, a study suggests that AI could already replace 12% of the American workforce.

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