Allow me to generate you a scene.
I’m packed, sardine-style, among commuters on NYC’s perpetually delayed G train. The city is stuck in one of those existential midsummer heatwaves, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that my neighbors skipped the deodorant step in their morning routines. If this amalgamation of limbs isn’t enough, what comprises the rest of my view? A train car interior wrapped in AI advertisements, unsettling by design, or the lack there of. Somethingorother.ai and its agents are champing at the bit to do some drafting, automating, optimizing — the works. I can’t help but wonder, *where is * Ava?, the uncanny “face” of the campaign that reads “Stop Hiring Humans.”
It’s an enticing offer, considering I’m only in this underground pressure cooker in an attempt to make it to work on time. Yet, I can’t help my visceral reaction every time I see these colonized ad blocks. Understanding that most AI startups are intentionally provocative has done nothing to ease my discomfort. The venture capital world, conversely, is at ease, fully on board. According to Crunchbase, AI startups captured $242 billion of the $300 billion global VC funding in Q1 2026 alone.
Still, a palpable tension remains between this B2B slop that’s devoid of creativity and the walls of the most creative city in the world. These campaigns have been cemented as public opinion canvases, with a dissenting Sharpie as the medium of choice. While many city-dwellers have resorted to low-degree vandalism or old-fashioned shit-talking (guilty as charged), few have been as bold as comedians Harris Alterman and Dave Ross in confronting the slopcalypse.
Back in June, the former social-media director and web developer-turned standup comedians installed satirical advertisements around the city, riffing on the uncontextualized copy that’s so characteristic of tech startups in 2026. The mockups were inspired by formulaic design from the likes of Genspark.ai, Brex and Linear, the latest wave of AI-integrated workspace platforms featuring autonomous agents.
Alterman and Ross shared with Business Insider their brilliantly simple process. They put together a document of stereotypical verbiage, rearranged the order until it made them laugh and printed it out on vinyl banners. Thus, the corporate Mad Libs was born: “We put the Q in QR1777. FiveTable;” “Zipline is now Froggle;” “From 2 to 5 in just one 3,” to name but a few.
Videos about their stunt on Instagram and TikTok garnered more than 7.5 million views, which led to a slew of profiles from major business publications. Then, at the beginning of this month, the duo shared on social media that they would be hosting a pop-up art installation in a West 4th St subway station newsstand to display their creations, distribute physical media and provide interactive elements for guests. A week later, the event’s e-vite had nearly 1,000 RSVPs.
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So when Saturday, August 8 rolled around, I hopped back on the iron horse (this time a less crowded F train) and headed downtown. At the end of the station platform, I saw “Hire everyone on Earth without doing anything,” a deadpan sarcasm I’d come to recognize, and knew I was in the right place.
The newsstand was wrapped in Alterman and Ross parodies, from “Still Merging Manually? Automatic merging for manual people.” to “What if forks were spoons? Cutlery.ai.” and was swarmed by curious passerby. Many folks in attendance heard about the event prior and came down intentionally. Incentives varied, though, as one 20-something shared she was there to “rage-bait her friends who love to use AI as a therapist.”
Inside the newsstand, a cardboard sign beckoned me to “Drink the Kool-aid” above racks of complimentary punch. Upon closer inspection, the Kool-aid man on the label was actually a very red Sam Altman. A silent auction sign-up sheet laid open for one-of-one original copies of the ads, whose bidding war proceeds would fund future projects. And, to my delight, there was an assortment of free items including stickers and local zines like Public Transit Magazine, created by fellow comedian Al Mullen and found exclusively through guerilla drops on the subway.
Mullen, the stand’s owner, explained it was licensed to him through the MTA’s Vacant Unit Activation Program, which enables the transformation of shuttered newsstands into creative community spaces. He partnered with Art on the Ave NYC, a nonprofit that’s turning vacant storefronts into art galleries, and had his grand opening just days ago on August 1, where he shared MTA conductor trading cards, lucky rat feet trinkets and a photo booth that developed colorful images denoting one’s “train aura.”
Back at the Alterman and Ross pop-up, I partook in the build-your-own fake tech ad component. A computer stocked with a word bank encouraged users to create a nonsensical startup title and tagline, then displayed it on a monitor for the crowd’s viewing pleasure. I scrolled through action verbs like democratizing, accelerating and transforming, followed by arbitrary nouns and adjectives until I landed on the most fitting slogan for my fictional company, FlowLine: “Revolutionizing streamlined piss.”
The way this project centers on language is not lost on me, particularly as LLMs actively reshape our vocabularies. This adoption — or co-option, rather — of the term “agent” into industry jargon highlights a conflict in how we define functioning versus existing. Agency at its core is the capacity to act. It ascribes self-governance, free-will, a degree of autonomy, qualities philosophy uses to differentiate the human experience from other sentient entities. It’s why collective thought is not something that simply happens to us. But in the context of agentic AI, the definitions of these qualities rely on the absence of human involvement alongside the presence of human data, creating purposeful mystery around agents and their access. This prompts a new question: What responsibilities can we claim as exclusively human?
Coverage (and their comment sections) around the subway stunt from Fast Company, Inc., Bloomberg, etc*.* have drifted towards the “why?” Ross agreed there’s a distinguishing factor between a why born out of genuine curiosity and a why derived from a defeatist “what’s the point?” attitude. In regard to individuals asking the latter, Ross explains, “They’re not emotionally where we’re at with these tech ads. Or they have fully drank the Kool-Aid and think we’re being assholes. Either way, it’s not for them, and that’s okay.”
Challenging engrained perspectives and creating new ways to elicit laughs out of each other? These are the types of insightful, gallows humor we need now.
“Overuse of social media has made us all listless and cynical, and my heart goes out to everyone in that state of mind because I get it and I’ve been there,” Ross says. “And I probably am there. But doing this show definitely taught me that a lot of people are trying to break out of that, and I think at the end of the day that’s the real value in questioning the motives of these tech companies.”
As we navigate the flood of AI inevitability, I think we’re all in the market for a greater sense of agency. In the meantime, I’d keep an eye out for FlowLine. We’re anticipating a splashy IPO.
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