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 wasnât even shipping on the new iPhones yet, I donât recall anyone speculating how Apple Intelligence itself would be advertised. Well, we have our answer, and itâs not great.
From the first Apple Intelligence ad, something didnât sit right with me. Letâs 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, itâs all so avoidable. You donât 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. Donât pretend that you know something that you donât, or did something that you didnât. Donât do whatever the hell this guy is doing. And, for crying out loud, donât be so fucking awkward about using your computer as that guy did in the last one.
LLMs (and AI by extension) have been called âbullshit machinesâ because they spout out anything and everything they think will next most likely word in response to your query. Not because it âknowsâ the right answer, itâs just going to bullshit its way to an answer. Fake it till you make it.
Apple Intelligence isnât all that different in that regard. I expected its LLM-powered features to bullshit me. I didnât 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 theyâre showing off about Apple Intelligence is a way to make it seem like youâre more thoughtful, attentive, and prepared than you really are.
And that just doesnât seem right to me. Show a parent and child imagining a story together, with Writing Tools helping them to adapt the story to the childâs every fanciful whim, and Image Playground bringing it to life with otherworldly illustrations. Show people building study quizzes with AI based on notes theyâve 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 Iâve 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 wouldnât 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 hasnât 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.
Iâm not the only one who has noticed this disheartening new direction for Appleâs marketing. Hereâs Anil Dash on Threads:
Itâs not important at all, but itâs interesting to note that Apple has made another recent ad thatâs 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 didnât do their work to fake their way through a meeting. Apple ads used to always show their users as experts or creative thinkers. Now theyâre workplace liars.
And hapax, who wrote so succinctly about this that Iâm 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 Appleâs ads for âApple Intelligenceâ comes up. These ads feature someone suddenly realizing that theyâre unprepared: a wife realizes that she forgot her husbandâs 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 âsave the dayâ by using Apple Intelligence to generate a summary of important information, or in the wifeâs 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. Thatâs 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 wonât make us more perfect. The more we expect âperfectionâ 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. Donât encourage us, in a time when weâre 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, âGive people wonderful tools and theyâll do wonderful things.â Itâs 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, âGive people bullshitting tools and theyâll do bullshit things.â Come on, Apple, do better.