To travel through the New York City subway system these days is to be assailed by technobabble.Â

Legions of tech startups have been founded in recent years, hoping to strike it rich in the AI gold rushâand all of them jostling for consumersâ attention in an increasingly crowded market. The result has been a deluge of ads selling some AI-powered product or other. Itâs not always easy to know what exactly is being sold, though. AI isnât a physical product, like a smartphone or a car, and not even the software engineers who build it can tell you exactly how it works.Â

âThe ads kind of have to be vague, because the product is vague,â Harris Alterman, a comedian living in New York City, recently told me. The sheer number and inscrutability of these ads can feel a bit disorienting, not unlike the feeling of scrolling through social media and seeing one AI-generated video after another. Alterman has coined a phrase to describe the mind-numbing quality of modern tech advertising: âslop voice.â

Earlier this year, Alterman and his friend and fellow comedian Dave Ross started noticing more and more of these inscrutable AI ads plastered across the city, especially in the subway. They all seemed to follow the same basic aesthetic recipe: minimalist graphic design, and copy filled with obscure jargon like âagentic,â âorchestration layer,â and âbusiness intelligence.âÂ

âItâs ugly design and nonsense writing, so it doesnât even add to my life artistically at all,â Ross told me. âItâs just frustrating and confusing and noticeably not for me.â He and Alterman started texting images of these ads back and forth, and soon wound up in a diner together, sketching out ideas for fake ads based on the template they had been seeing across the city.

âThey really just write themselvesâtheyâre just so ripe for parody that it just falls right out of your brain,â Alterman says. They soon created ten full-scale prints of each faux company, and hung them in two New York City subway stations in Brooklyn. The video of the stunt quickly went viral.

Some of the ads are obviously fictitious: Very few people are going to think UpsideDownTexas.ai is an actual brand, for example (though a Boston-based software engineer is now using the domain for his personal website). Others are in more uncanny valley territory, just barely plausible enough to make you wonder if it could in fact be a real thing. One of my personal favorites: âZiplink is now Froggle.â As if to prove Altermanâs and Rossâ point, I received a story pitch from a PR rep in June with the subject heading: âAllbirds is now Smartbird AI,â referring to the shoe brandâs recent AI-oriented rebrand. Art truly does imitate life, in this case.

Alterman’s and Harris’ first viral video was followed by a second, posted to social media last month and including a fresh batch of fake ads (âunderwAIr: Panties that thinkâ). They also created a new fake parent company to “own” all the bogus brands, called “AI Conglomerate.”

This past Saturdayâa swelteringly hot day in New Yorkâthe duo hosted a pop-up exhibit inside an old news stand on a subway platform in Lower Manhattan. They distributed free UpsideDownTexas.ai stickers and Kool-Aid Jammers, the labels of which had been plastered over with stickers of Sam Altman as the Kool-Aid Man. A crowd of sweaty New Yorkers milled about, taking photos and giggling.

The fake adsâ appeal seem to be tapping into a communal experience: the same frustration and confusion Ross had told me heâd been feeling, on a mass scale. In an age when vague ads for AI products are being beamed down at you from billboard and within the narrow tube of subway cars, it can be comforting to know you arenât the only one feeling disoriented by the onslaught of âslop voice.âÂ

âI feel like it does connect you to other people to be like, âLook, we’re all going crazy,â Alterman told me. âThat’s nice. And, I mean, hopefully itâll lead to less shitty advertising.â