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Apple is straight-up telling us to lie

In all the hubbub back in September wondering how Apple was going to advertise its new iPhones with Apple Intelligence when Apple Intelligence wasn’t even shipping on the new iPhones yet, I don’t recall anyone speculating how Apple Intelligence itself would be advertised. Well, we have our answer, and it’s not great.

From the first Apple Intelligence ad, something didn’t sit right with me. Let’s watch it together:

Did you catch it? No? How about another:

What about that time? Do you need another? Here:

Clearly, you caught it that time, right, especially since my lede is in the title. I think this is the first time Apple has actively encouraged us to lie to one another in one of its ads.

Worse yet, it’s all so avoidable. You don’t have to deceive your friends and coworkers. Be honest with them and say you forgot to read the email, that you remember your last meeting but not their name, or that you need a little time to catch up on the prospective. Then use Apple Intelligence to get your work done faster. Don’t pretend that you know something that you don’t, or did something that you didn’t. Don’t do whatever the hell this guy is doing. And, for crying out loud, don’t be so fucking awkward about using your computer as that guy did in the last one.

LLMs (and AI by extension) have been called “bullshit machines” because they spout out anything and everything they think will next most likely word in response to your query. Not because it “knows” the right answer, it’s just going to bullshit its way to an answer. Fake it till you make it.

Apple Intelligence isn’t all that different in that regard. I expected its LLM-powered features to bullshit me. I didn’t think they would shown off, by Apple as enabled by Apple Intelligence, to deceive one another about the status of a project or our memory of our last meeting together. Almost everything they’re showing off about Apple Intelligence is a way to make it seem like you’re more thoughtful, attentive, and prepared than you really are.

And that just doesn’t seem right to me. Show a parent and child imagining a story together, with Writing Tools helping them to adapt the story to the child’s every fanciful whim, and Image Playground bringing it to life with otherworldly illustrations. Show people building study quizzes with AI based on notes they’ve taken and lecture transcriptions. Show movie memories being made with unlikely themes, generated from your photos and videos based on an imaginative prompt (but not thrown together at the last second and then passed off as a thoughtful gift).

In fact, this is probably the only good Apple Intelligence ad I’ve seen so far:

The guy was able to get his frustrated emotions out by typing an unhinged email. He used Writing Tools to tone it down so that he wouldn’t be an asshole to his coworker. They even showed him perhaps learning how using kind words both got him his pudding back and earned him the respect of the thief. All good stuff, humorous, and legitimately useful. Who among us hasn’t typed out a nasty-gram only to delete it and then have to write more professionally? Apple Intelligence can help in that situation, saving us time, just as computers have always been designed to do.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this disheartening new direction for Apple’s marketing. Here’s Anil Dash on Threads:

It’s not important at all, but it’s interesting to note that Apple has made another recent ad that’s as bad as the hydraulic press one where they destroyed all the instruments. In this one, it shows their AI tool being used by someone who didn’t do their work to fake their way through a meeting. Apple ads used to always show their users as experts or creative thinkers. Now they’re workplace liars.

And hapax, who wrote so succinctly about this that I’m going to quote them in full:

My wife and I have been watching Parks and Rec a lot lately. Every ad break it seems like one of Apple’s ads for “Apple Intelligence” comes up. These ads feature someone suddenly realizing that they’re unprepared: a wife realizes that she forgot her husband’s birthday; a lawyer realizes that he forgot to read an important document; an actor realizes that they forgot to read a pitch for a show. The unprepared person is able to quickly “save the day” by using Apple Intelligence to generate a summary of important information, or in the wife’s case, to generate an animated slideshow of sentimental photos.

These ads consistently leave me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Obviously, everyone is unprepared sometimes. Everyone occasionally forgets an important birthday, or shows up to a meeting without having prepped. That’s part of being human. The myth of AI is that we can eliminate human fallibility, that we can smooth out our rough edges with enough technology. News flash: more technology won’t make us more perfect. The more we expect “perfection” from others, the less grace we will have with them. The less space we leave for forgiveness and understanding.

Show us creating something new, more, and better with Siri, empowered by Apple Intelligence, as our helpful assistant. Don’t encourage us, in a time when we’re already far too mistrustful of one another, to deceive our friends, family, and colleagues with the click of a button.

One of my favorite videos that Apple has ever put out was this one.1 In it, they profess, “Give people wonderful tools and they’ll do wonderful things.” It’s a sentiment that I took to heart, and that I truly think they, as a company, believed at the time. Today, a version of that video might instead read, “Give people bullshitting tools and they’ll do bullshit things.” Come on, Apple, do better.


  1. In tracking down this video, I came across this one that shows, allegedly, an early draft version from 2016, a pre-release version from 2018, and the final version from 2019 all side-by-side. They’re each so beautiful.↩


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