Salesforce Is Using A Hallucination To Sell AI – Defector

11:41 AM EST on February 7, 2025A lot is happening in the world of artificial intelligence, and not a lot of it makes sense. We’re told that AI is the future of business, yet it is wildly unprofitable; investment in AI companies is ramping up even as AI-adjacent tech stocks tumble; the American Plagiarism Machine is accusing the Chinese Plagiarism Machine of plagiarism. But nothing—nothing—is as head-spinning, as bizarre, or as infuriating as this, the bafflingly ubiquitous ad where renowned actors Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson hawk Salesforce’s newest AI enterprise software product:I want to note up front that my anger with this commercial is not because it is aimed at somebody who is not me. I’ve lived in D.C., and as such I am intimately familiar with seeing ads on the Metro designed to appeal exclusively to a handful of senators and Department of Defense procurement specialists. Our Kinetic Weapon Systems Shred Human Bodies 15 Percent Faster Than Our Competitors … Northrup Grumman: We Make The Possible Practical, etc. I mostly do not mind when the ad I am watching is selling something I do not need and cannot buy for a business I do not run.But this commercial? This one is different. The bewilderment and rage at this commercial has spread to all corners of the internet, including the hosts of the legal podcast 5-4, sportswriter Katie Nolan, and countless social media posts. It demands an explication, which I will do my best to provide to you at the cost of what is left of my sanity. The ad—entitled “Dining Alfiasco,” its first and last moment of wit—begins with a thoroughly soaked McConaughey, sitting alone outside a restaurant in the middle of the pouring rain:First off, the sheer density of this opening text rivals only “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died” in the modern canon. Subjects, objects, and causal relationships pummel and disorient the viewer like a flurry of jabs to the face. This will also be, incredibly, the least confusing part of this sentence.This tell-don’t-show exposition immediately raises numerous questions, none of which are answerable without descending into the mouth of madness. For starters: Wealthy and extremely famous person Matthew McConaughey makes his dinner reservations with a booking app? How many OpenTable points do we think he has? And what does it matter that his initial reservation was for a table outside; in what universe would a restaurant staff decide to seat anyone—let alone Matthew David Goddamn McConaughey—outside during a deluge? Were there no indoor tables available at this restaurant, or did they refuse to modify his reservation on principle? In either case, how would an AI agent powered by AgentforceTM—a cutting-edge digital labor platform, certainly, but not a miracle worker—accomplish what McConaughey apparently could not? And, why—for the love of God, why—would McConaughey let himself be seated outside during this downpour? Why has he decided to be complicit in his own abjection?Also, note McConaughey’s line reading here: He says that the absent-or-incompetent AI agent didn’t know to move “my reservations” inside. (He says the line quickly, but he definitely says reservations, plural. By now, my relationship to this commercial is roughly that of Jim Garrison to the Zapruder film.) “My reservations” is either a perfect Freudian slip, a reveal that even McConaughey understands enough about AI to trigger subconscious anxiety, or—horrifyingly—an insinuation that this exact situation, which never has happened to anyone else, ever, has happened to Matthew McConaughey multiple times.The ad continues, with McConaughey disdainfully considering a shrimp cocktail before shoving it away:With this, the ad moves from the merely inexplicable to the thoroughly insane. McConaughey is dining—or attempting to dine, given adverse conditions—at a restaurant where they bring food to you unbidden? The simple act and near-universal social custom of perusing a menu of available dishes and communicating what you want to the kitchen, either directly or through a go-between, has been abandoned at this establishment? The thoroughly solved problem of obtaining the food that you want from an establishment that sells food—at least as, if not more, thoroughly solved than the problem of water falling from the sky onto your body—now requires AI to ensure that people don’t incorrectly get what they didn’t order?It is simply wild that Salesforce has this opportunity to highlight to a mass audience, even indirectly, their best and most promising use-case for AI, and here they are aggressively pitching an inscrutable solution to a non-existent problem. What often ruins advertisements aimed at the highest socioeconomic strata is a lack of relatability. (Is your banged-up old car elevator ruining your enjoyment of your Maui beach house?) In a mind-bending twist, that is not the problem here. The basics of this premise—a restaurant, a table, food, even a booking app—are extremely relatable to almost everyone. What makes this commercial an avant-garde experience is that at no point are the people on-screen relating to these perfectly ordinary things in a way that any human ever has. Booking apps are in charge of ordering the food while the restaurants abuse their patrons, and in Rand McNally hamburgers eat people.The only true note in all of this is that it is totally believable that Matthew McConaughey finds a mere shrimp cocktail beneath his enlightened palate. Again, though, we return to the central question: Why is he just sitting there? He is deliberately immiserating himself through inaction, while the only people who could conceivably help him are instead making his situation worse. Nobody should be treated like this, let alone an Oscar-winning actor, Lincoln Motor Company in-house poet, and the man famous for playing Wooderson, the charming and eminently quotable pedophile from Dazed and Confused. Why won’t he leave??? Everyone is acting like it has to be this way, but it … just … doesn’t?It is at this moment that the true terror sets in. This ad is not a sales pitch; it is a vision of the dystopia to come. The world depicted in this commercial is one where AI has come to dominate our lives. AI will be what intermediates you and other human beings, it will direct you where to go and what to do, it will give you what it decides to give you, its decisions are binding on you and others, its judgment is irreversible, and you will have to sit there and take it. The only choice you have here is to choose which machine makes your choices for you. Salesforce promises that AgentforceTM AI will allow you to “unlock human success,” but this ad reveals that the opposite is true: It will, at best, construct for you a higher-quality prison. This situation is unbearably bleak, until: Suddenly, we see our hero, Woody Harrelson, dining at a restaurant across the street and oafishly grinning at the predicament McConaughey has found himself in. Harrelson’s dinner companions are a man and a woman of indeterminable age and mysterious relation; McConaughey’s debasement brings peals of laughter from the man and a look of abject horror from the woman. Neither speaks, and it is plausible that they exist only because it would be sad to show Harrelson dining alone. Could they be AI-generated? My thoughts are indistinguishable from Rorschach diary entries at this point.Two things are immediately evident upon the Harrelson reveal. First—and, for me, the most important—there is the tantalizing possibility that what we’re seeing is happening in the world of True Detective, Season 1. To those skeptical of this reading, I ask: Who is more likely to sit in obvious discomfort for reasons they cannot articulate, international superstar Matthew McConaughey or self-destructive nihilist Rust Cohle? (“I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it’s obviously my programming, and I lack the constitution for suicide.”) And if anyone would forego human connection and give himself over to an AI-powered ubermensch—though one sadly lacking AgentforceTM’s powerful Atlas Reasoning Engine and specialized, always-on support—wouldn’t it be someone who has witnessed firsthand man’s inhumanity to man, and is also in possession of an A.J. Soprano–level understanding of Nietzsche? (“Why should I live in history, huh? Fuck, I don’t wanna know anything anymore. This is a world where nothing is solved.”) You can see it, right?In any event, the second thing you notice is what doesn’t happen next. In a normal commercial, it would be revealed that Harrelson did what McConaughey failed to do: namely, that he had used a booking app that does have AgentforceTM, and as a result its AI agent—no doubt using its seamless integration with the Salesforce ecosystem—did know to seat diners where it is dry instead of where it is wet. This is Advertising 101: You introduce Goofus, who doesn’t use your product, and therefore is sad; then you show Gallant, who does use your product, and therefore is happy.I very much dislike these kinds of ads—the sputtering emasculation of Goofus, the tired gender stereotype of Goofus’s harumphing wife, the thought of disappointing those that I love with my poor choice of interior wall paint—and yet there is no catharsis in an ad that shows Goofus’s pain without Gallant’s triumph. But imagine, just imagine, Harrelson turning to the camera and saying something like: “Thankfully, my booking app had AgentforceTM powering its AI agent, and that’s the reason why I moved indoors during a storm and that’s why this restaurant served me the food that I wanted.”That pitch never comes, for the obvious reason that it would make absolutely no goddamn sense. Still, its absence gives the whole game away: Nobody in this commercial, or anywhere, actually needs any of this shit. There is no evidence that the other, competent restaurant uses AI at all, or that the other diners needed an AI agent in a booking app to get themselves out of the rain, or that the Harrelson throuple did anything other than order their food off a menu like actual human beings. They are normal people doing normal things in a normal way; only McConaughey needs the power of AI to avoid rain and purchase food, two things mankind has been doing successfully for thousands of years.After some small talk about the necessity of the rain (… reference to horrors of climate change or mere coincidence? … hunrh … must investigate further …), Harrelson finally extends his hand:Harrelson considers McConaughey in a way that AI could never: as a person, with autonomy and agency. Harrelson reaches out to him with love, beckoning him back to humanity. In doing so, Harrelson gives McConaughey that which had been taken from him, that what he could not see he needed: a choice. He is free to leave this cursed place, and at long last, become fully himself again. As McConaughey gets up to cross the street, the tagline flashes:Given what we’ve seen here, it is clear what AI is meant to be. AI is meant to be ignored, discarded, rejected in favor of the shelter of community and the warm embrace of a friend. Rust Cohle, again:To realize that all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memories, all your pain, it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person.Come on. It kinda works, right?If you liked this blog, please share it! Your referrals help Defector reach new readers, and those new readers always get a few free blogs before encountering our paywall.Alan James Kluegel is a law professor who lives in Lexington, KY, with a bunch of mice that showed up at his house after his cat died.  He is the author of A Practical Casebook For Business Associations, an open-access textbook on corporate law used by the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful business law professors.Sign up for our free newsletterThis is Defector, a new sports blog and media company. 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