Misguided Apple Intelligence ads

That guy looks lazy and bad at his job. Compare that ad to this famous Excel ad from the 90s.

https://youtu.be/kOO31qFmi9A?si=Ww9i4FCxxpMj3YIs

The guy in the Excel commercial comes off as cool, confident, and skilled at using Excel. Both ads show off the speed of the tool in high stakes scenarios, but the Apple one makes the user look like an idiot. Also the Apple ad shows everyone with macs, so he has no advantage over everyone else.

Kind of. The guy in this ad is portrayed as a slacker who didn't read the report everyone was expected to read. He presumably received the report well in advance of the meeting, he just didn't bother to look at it.

This is very different from someone who was given a report he/she could not possibly have read in time!

This guy is the person who uses Sparknotes instead of doing his homework. I'm all for efficiency, but if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report, they'd just have written the summary.

Of course, maybe in this brave new world we're living in, the report's author did just write a summary, then used AI to turn it into a multi-page document, which readers used AI to turn back into a summary.

Is this what we want?

That's not "[understanding] a complex report." It exemplifies the authors point that they're portraying it as "tools for those unwilling to put in any effort." During this meeting, how is that guy going to critique any detail from the prospectus or make any useful contribution from the 20 second summary?

I think these LLMs are tremendously useful and the ads undersell them. But I can also appreciate that the ads have to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and showing real workflows in 30sec is difficult.

Compare to Microsoft Copilot ad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWXbd2fKTu8

All these "why AI" ads, addons, features et al makes me think it's just middle managers having ideas on how to make their jobs easier and work the least while getting credit for bringing AI to the table.

Reviewing emails, summarizing meetings, documents, key points, TPS reports.

Are these all seriously that impactful? If your job can be condensed into information summarising, then your job can and will be done by the same machine that is doing the summarising for you.

Any and all "edge" a human might have in that business (unique insight and perspectives, noticing details that sound okay but actually aren't, human pattern recognition) get lost in the human-AI-AI-human translation. In this commercial, if prospectus was written by AI and is now summarized by AI, what is the point of the people around the table? The ad's should be used to show it's impact to scale the edge instead of scaling generic business bullshit.

If your company is a swarm of people using AI to generate all input/output, your company might scale wider but it will (mostly) be doing mediocre work - unless your hires are explicitly good at using AI. If it's mediocre and scaled wide, others can easily create the same output and beat you with pricing.

tl;dr; scale the edge, not the middle.

To me it feels like the intended subtext there is "this stuff is meant to make your life easier sometimes, but we don't think it will revolutionize the world", which seems way more bearable to me than how a lot of companies are trying to push "AI" stuff.

> On the other side though, it definitely portrays the AI user as a sort of slacker

I think this is called “meeting users where they are”.

The first one is humorous, but the second is a little iffy (lying to your family). But the final shot of the mom is funny because she looks almost nefarious.

Schrödinger's douchbag

Agreed. Apple is dancing around the topic of labor replacment with a deft chuckle by starring the buffoon.

Granted, some of these tack too far towards stupid to be relatable, but I get why they picked this approach.

My bottom of the barrel so far was the "Write me a training plan to run a marathon" commercial. Because obviously sitting down for 30 minutes, and not the multiple months of sticking to a training regimen, was the blocker there...

That's also the desire of the majority of companies, not just Apple.

We need to can this "passive media consumption" nonsense with respect to Apple. Do you know any musicians? Pretty much all of them use Apple gear inasmuch as they work digitally, even iPhones and iPads.

Android's JVM bullshit makes it a "passive media consumption" platform, but iOS and iPadOS have real-time features that let them respond to input events with very low latency, perfect for creative work like music and visual art. Accordingly, the best creativity apps for mobile platforms work ONLY on iOS and iPadOS.

Cheapshot based on cynicism but no more relevant for Apple customers than Android customers.

I figure expectations/behaviors will shift once this becomes the new norm. That 5-second birthday present or shallow prospectus summary will become obvious pretty soon after a wide uptake and nullify any advantage.

> Remember -- the lazy, bad at your job, etc. assumptions are attributes you are putting on the characters in the ads. At no point in the world of the ad are these indicated by any of the other participants.

This argument is completely dishonest, despite your sanctimonious tone. The premise of the ads is that the person intentionally misleads others by hiding the fact they're using Apple Intelligence. Apple is celebrating a culture where you lie to family and coworkers over trivial things, which is why these ads are so contemptible.

If the office worker in the commercial had said "I didn't read that paper, let me ask Apple Intelligence" then I'm guessing his coworkers would correctly think he was lazy and bad at his job, and would probably take a closer look at his work if they knew an AI was doing it. Instead he lied and his coworkers bought it, allowing him to corrupt his company with AI slop. These ads are just totally indefensible.

> Remember -- the lazy, bad at your job, etc. assumptions are attributes you are putting on the characters in the ads.

Somehow, I don't think this has escaped the ad agency that made these.

Yes, they get what they wanted, without the effort.

Respect without the effort of earning it is worthless. Love without any effort is a lie.

These ads just tell us that you can have something that requires effort, without the effort part. The second ads even ends with the look that says "I will do it this way from now on".

The ads simply reflect the contemporary state of tech's moral bankruptcy. Apple of old wouldn't have sanctioned ads showcasing such a half-baked use case.

even the old ipod ads were about how much you could enjoy music with dancing and stuff. this batch of ads are just shortcuts in life, that really, you shouldn't be making in the first place.

that one that smushed everything from the past info an iPad wasn't well recieved either

If it's not clear, Apple has lost its mojo from the time Steve Jobs has gone. The vision pro showed us that.

Same here. I've said it elsewhere, my Samsung Galaxy has been doing such videos automatically, out of random photos in my gallery (grouped via one of couple built-in semantic categories), every couple days, for 3+ years now.

Such collages are obvious to spot, too. There's only a limited selection of music, which you quickly memorize, some photos don't really match the generated title, the mood is off, etc.

This ad would've made sense 5 years ago, not today.

That second ad is beyond embarrassing both for the lazy-ass wife character and Apple.

And if the ads do age well, I probably won't. Not with historic new low-points in basic human integrity.

Next up: A tool to help absentee parents trick their lonely children, pretending that they observed the school play and were impressed with their child's contribution.

Back when ChatGPT first released there was a common meme of people writing up a list of bullet points and converting them into a formal, verbose email via AI, and the receiver then using AI to summarize that email back down to a list of bullet points. I imagine a ton of current use of LLMs is something of this sort.

> Anyone who has been half paying attention to "AI" wouldn't be impressed any more with a formal, professionally written email from anybody

You’re vastly overestimating the self awareness of the average person.

> Anyone who has been half paying attention to "AI"

I think this is probably aimed at normal people. I expect the tight integration looks much, much more attractive than typing into some random site.

> someone whose performance review had evidence of being "enhanced"

now waiting for the persistent memory GPT where the employees start manipulating things to always give Dave a great review. I can see dave "polluting" the data the GPT is fed, or all other shenanigans to ensure a good review other than actually just doing a good job

It doesn't work here because there's a mismatch between the format and the intended message.

She forgot his birthday but scrambles and buys him a 7-eleven hot dog - funny, self-aware. 7-Eleven doesn't actually believe the hot dog is a very good birthday gift.

She forgot his birthday but scrambles and buys him a Rolex - materialist, not for everyone but will appeal to some. Not very funny.

She forgot his birthday but scrambles and buys him a cheap fake Rolex - not that funny, just an ad for counterfeits?

Does Apple think that having an AI slap together some images without your involvement is a thoughtful birthday gift? Then why show it so clearly as insincere and low-effort?

Or do they think it's a bad gift? Then what are they trying to say about their product? We assume they want to be perceived as a premium brand.

The ad could have just played it straight. Like, couple sits in couch, "Remember when we were at Ibiza?" "Let's relive those moments" (types "Ibiza vacation" into phone) (music swells as couple looks at phone screen with fake smiles)

But that would be tacky. Funny at their expense. So they add a twist, make it so they are in on the joke. But now the messaging isn't coherent. Is the product good? bad? premium? cheap?

I speculate that the ads were created long before Apple AI was delayed to the following year, in 2023. And culture hadn't realized how big a negative side such a cool tech has, then. Generously.

They're clearly meant to be humorous, and everyone gets that. However they are truly terrible ads. They paint Apple's features with a negative tone and are the sort of lazy, low-effort entrant that you expect from gambling or crypto sites. Just garbage ads.

I know nothing about the ad business, but I feel like Apple must have engaged with an irregular agency for this. They're so out of character for the company.

I'm certainly reading them as jokes.

It's a classic 'someone is being mildly bad, but the amusement of everybody it works out anyway'.

Idk as someone who doesnt really consume a lot of commercials, the most interesting thing here to me is that they are funny ads. I can't speak to the article's critique itself, but I think the choice here of going whimsical/funny is pretty telling of what all this AI stuff is ultimately going to resolve down to for the consumer/user. Nobody wants to be OpenAI anymore, all their profundity is lost on everyone except people on this particular website we are on. It just seems like going that route is starting to feel like not a great bet, I think, to the older, more mainstream companies in the space. They always see which way the wind is blowing, they can pay to.

Those humans. When will they stop?

(This should also be read as a joke.)

They read very obviously as jokes, but still strike me as distasteful and tonedeaf. If they were in a satire of apple, they could be funny, but the idea of AI slop infecting even family gifts is just so, so dark and depressing it's hard to see why they thought it could sell phones.

Helping people be more productive with less effort, I'm all for it. But letting people fake the appearance of effort or sincerity by passing off AI-generated content as their own? Nope nope nope.