A Bicycle of the Mind

<rant>

Apple recently dropped some new ads promoting Apple Intelligence (their extremely underwhelming “AI” features), and they are not good. They’re so bad, in fact, that I felt compelled to complain about them here.

First up, we’re in what appears to be a pretty important business meeting where our protagonist hasn’t prepared and isn’t paying attention. When someone else calls him out, he awkwardly slides out of the room, gets a summary from Apple Intelligence, awkwardly slides back in, and starts leading the discussion.

I mean, it’s funny (allegedly), but what about the actual message? The guy just comes across as a slacker, and I can’t imagine a bigger waste of my time than being walked through a document by someone who hasn’t bothered to read it.

In the next ad, we see another office worker writing an incensed email to the coworker who keeps stealing his pudding from the fridge, before he uses Apple Intelligence to rewrite the email into a more diplomatic tone. This ad is pretty inoffensive and I have nothing to say about it.

Still in the office, we meet a guy who’s goofing off and generally annoying the shit out of his colleagues. He then fires off an incomprehensible email to his boss, but not before using Apple Intelligence to completely rewrite it into something coherently professional. This email absolutely shocks his boss, meanwhile the guy is still actively goofing off.

The only way I can interpret this ad is that Apple Intelligence is a tool used by the lazy and incompetent to appear less lazy and less incompetent. If he were my coworker, I’d steal his pudding out of spite.

Finally, we leave the office and join a woman who’s forgotten that today is her husband’s birthday. While their children present thoughtful, handmade gifts (to which she reacts with contempt, for some reason?), she uses Apple Intelligence to throw together a “Memory Movie” on her iPhone in about five seconds. Day saved, loveless marriage preserved, smugness retained.

I mean, where do you even start with this one? In under a minute, she’s portrayed as uncaring, lazy, and dishonest. I’d call it efficient writing if they were trying to establish a villain.

This ad just sucks.

It’s absolutely baffling that Apple felt enough pressure to issue an apology for the controversial “Crush!” ad, while it’s still radio silence on this ad campaign. Yes, the optics of Crush! were not good, but I think that the message itself was clear: “hey, we’ve taken all these creative tools and combined them in an ultra-thin tablet!” Setting aside the other implications of the visuals, the core is fine. In comparison, the core message of these Apple Intelligence ads seems to be, “we’ve built a tool to help you lazy people be even lazier, and hide it, too!” Regardless of if you personally find these ads funny, there’s no escaping it: the way the product promoted by these ads is shown being used is negative.

These ads run contrary to what was once the core of Apple’s DNA. There’s an anecdote Steve Jobs reused a lot throughout the '80s and '90s, and it’s one I quite like:

I remember reading an article […] where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet Earth. […] And the Condor won, came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else. And humans came in about a third of the way down the list, which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation. But somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. Human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor, all the way off the top of the list.

And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders, and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind, something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.

This isn’t enhancing human ability, it’s removing it. You’re not riding the bicycle, you’re half-asleep in the back of a taxi.

</rant>

For what it’s worth, I tried using Apple Intelligence’s proofreading feature on this article before publishing it. In fairness, the changes it made were mostly fine, but I had to use a separate comparison tool to review them. Apparently it’s supposed to highlight any edits it makes, but that seems to only work in certain apps right now.