I think the phrase we're looking for is "publicity stunt". Seems a fairly harmless and self-effacing one at that.

> The point is that it's an ad.

Sure, but like the other guy said, that's the point of publicity stunts. It doesn't even have to be specific to a company/ad, any silly thing like this is going to sound crazy if you take it seriously and "extend its logic as far as it will go". Like seeing the Sony bouncy balls rolling down the street ad and going "holy shit, these TV companies are going to ruin the world by dropping bouncy balls on all of us". It's a valid thought experiment, but kind of a strange thing to focus on so sternly when it's clearly not taking itself seriously, especially compared to all the real-world concerning uses of AI.

(And it is pretty funny, too. If anything I think we'd all prefer more creative ads like this and the bouncy ball one, and less AI-generated doomer Coke ads or such.)

You’re thinking of replacing a vending machine with a chatbot which indeed doesn’t make much sense. The experiment was replacing the management of the machine. It’s not crazy to think that, money being no object, it would be great to have a person who hangs around the machine, whose job it is to ask customers what kinds of things people might want to buy from the machine, and conduct trials, tinker with pricing, do promotional deals, etc. But that’s of course impractical to have a FTE per machine to do that. The idea of this experiment was to see if that could be done with Claude. And of course as others have pointed out, it’s a simple and cheap and low-stakes version of “a business” suitable for experimenting with.

If I recall, the idea was the AI taking the role of the vending machine manager, choosing and restocking products and such. Anything on top of that was, I assume, just added for fun.