I haven’t got my thinking cap on. I haven’t got my thinking cap on because Anthropic, the AI company that’s been giving out caps with “thinking” written on them at a three-day brand activation in London, ran out of caps at lunchtime on day two. The city’s techies queued down the street in Marylebone below Saturday’s driving rain, then posted triumphantly about their acquisitions on X. I’m here on Sunday, and the only goodies left are packets of tiny banana muffins, and a photobooth.
When I first saw the thinking caps in pictures from Anthropic’s first event in New York last month, they stirred something in me. They’re wryly conceptual but also aesthetically tasteful, with a white, all-lowercase serif font on faded primary colours. The other stuff – pamphlets with embossed titles; doodle-adjacent illustrations – was nice too. “Really nice,” I thought, as if I was in a modern-day American Psycho business card scene, updated to revolve around company stash.
The tech world’s usual radioactive dorkiness is almost wholly absent. Like the New York event, the London one is being held at an upmarket newsagent run by Air Mail, the digital magazine founded by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. One teaser photo was of someone in a thinking cap reading the London Review of Books – a little ironic, you could say, given that the large language models of AI companies have partly derived their abilities by scraping human-written text from publishers big and small.
Much of our day-to-day experience of AI is encountering ChatGPT’s neutered prose or smooth-brain visual output. OpenAI and Meta have both released TikTok-style feeds of AI-generated short-form video, which register as something like the 15th and 16th horsemen in the coming AI-assisted apocalypse of human literacy and general cognition. The use of AI for creative shortcuts, real or alleged, is torn apart online, and some media is now issued with tags saying that “no generative AI was used in the making of this film” (A24’s Heretic) or “this show was made by humans” (the new TV show Pluribus). In this context, can AI be “cool” in any meaningful sense?
Anthropic is trying its best, positioning its Claude series of large language models (LLMs) as far away from slop as possible – as force multipliers, not replacements, for our brains. Hence the tasteful analogue-ness of these events, and an ad put out in September with the tagline “Keep thinking”. Thematically, it sloshes around in the used bathwater of the Apple campaigns that made Steve Jobs’ computers so sexy. Claude displays an animated orange splotch on screen, as if its output is emanating from a friendly cartoon sprite rather than a coolant-chugging server farm. “Claude is for those who see AI not as a shortcut,” says Andrew Stirk, Anthropic’s head of brand marketing, “but as a thinking partner to take on their most meaningful challenges.”
Unsurprisingly, the kind of people who would spend a Sunday morning at an AI brand activation are amenable to this idea. When I first enter a small room of art books now serving as a networking space, a man with an indeterminate European accent is holding forth to a few others about “forward deployed engineers”. “You ever heard of this concept from Palantir?” he says, before explaining it anyway.
“Are you building in this space?” a pensive-looking startup founder called Lawrence asks me when I enquire whether he works in tech. For him, cool means meeting interesting people and building interesting things, and AI helps with the latter. “It’s become so ingrained within my workflow it’s like an additional appendage,” he says. A trio of young south Asian guys, who look barely out of their teens, think AI is cool too. “The things a normal human can’t do, it can do,” says Aryan. “Computers were just big, ugly, black boxes, and then Apple made them cool purely because of the branding,” says Kish – and he thinks the “hype” and “energy” around AI is currently motoring a similar process.
Someone else mentions that Claude has a classier name than the other chatbots. It’s true – “Claude” sounds like an experienced French hotel concierge of indeterminate sexuality, while ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot sound like the cold circuit boards they are. Claude is running ads in Shoreditch, the same person says. Surely that makes it cool?
I don’t know. Unlike the chirpy crowd that surrounds me, I’m a journalist; how I feel about AI is not unlike how a fox feels about a foxhound. But the idea of a clever tool for clever people is seductive. The hats, even more so. How AI’s status solidifies in ostensibly glamorous professions beyond the tech world – media, academia, the arts – will go a long way to determining how far it permeates our intellectual life. A wrestling match is kicking off between burgeoning neo-luddism and the finest marketing departments venture capital money can buy.
[Further reading: The feminisation mystique: who ruined the West?]
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