Watching this ad took me back to being a kid in church, judging a sermon on whether its message of Christianity could ever land well enough with the world it aims to save.
In the spheres I surround myself with today, development environments change by the week: meta prompting, loops, oh you’re not running your agents on a server? Then how do your bugs get fixed with your laptop closed. Single weeks can feel like missed opportunities to compound months of valuable effort. Sometimes, it can feel like I practice a totally different religion than AI cynics.
I’m not exactly sure how I feel about the alternative, but I think it’s a little bit of apprehension. I think of the parable about a son who’d rejected his household to find his own way, his dad who’d come running to lavishly welcome him back with a feast. I think of the people who want to believe in this God of grace, in life after death, and yet feel judged by their local parish. I think of the newly minted Mac Mini owners setting up their new OpenClaws to power a new life for their businesses, yet fear the “permanent underclass” narrative perhaps even more so than being condemned into hell. As I watched that ad, and the piano blips and the voice recordings gave way to a haunting chord progression, I wondered if only I had heard the beauty in the melancholy, if the message of “hope in hard questions” would crest the wave of job loss, of data centers and climate change, of this world that AI optimists claim this would save.
I remember my friend’s family giving me a ride back from the airport one summer after a science camp, asking me about my family and the church where we spent much of our time. As I sat in the back of the minivan, her father asked, “How much do you have to give?”. Her mom quickly stifled the question and yet to my surprise I said plainly, “10 percent”. When you are told week in and week out that the world is burning, checkbooks felt less important than how you think about the life you have.
In church circles, you could spend forever debating the perfect arguments about theological concepts, like Brunelleschi architecting every facet of the Duomo for his cathedral in Florence. The new priesthood of AI Twitter, upon seeing this new ad, have turned up their noses at the graveyard imagery, the burning building. They tell Anthropic to go back to its Superbowl ad campaign about “chatbots without ads”. This new one won’t land because most people don’t have the lore, and Anthropic needs to get off its God complex, and how early we are in all of this. I suppose, among the World Cup watch parties in which the ad aired, they could have also surprised themselves by stating to their neighbors, as plainly as a passionate belief delivered in between bites of a chicken wing, why pay $20 for Claude and not ChatGPT.
Missionaries don’t build their churches by scrolling missionary timelines or by endlessly debating the theory. What matters to them is the space that people walk into with their insecurities about the future, seeing their lives as estuaries where people arrive with questions at the end of themselves.
Sure, maybe to most, the ad is all about a product shaped like a person. And maybe it doesn’t deserve to be clothed as institution shaped like the inevitable. But you know what else has historically, unabashedly, featured graveyards adjacent to a product that’s supposed to be hospitable? A church.
And we don’t have to pretend the world is changing slower than it is.