Not Quite Lifelike

Apple issued a mea culpa last week, saying it had “missed the mark” after backlash over its latest commercial. The advertisement for its new iPad was shown at a promotional event and posted on social media by CEO Tim Cook. The video features a hydraulic press squashing musical instruments and art materials as well as gaming consoles and stress balls. Time wrote:

“We watch a trumpet get crushed, followed by paint cans, a clay sculpture of a person’s head, an angry bird doll, an old fashioned television, cameras, a guitar, books, and plush emoji toys. Finally, after the press has crushed all the items, the metal slab lifts up again, and an iPad is revealed to be underneath.”

Don’t forget the piano too.

Premieres of new tech predictably spruik bigger, more vibrant screens (ooh, so lifelike!), lighter devices, more memory, faster processors.. This one claimed all that, but also that it is thinner, thus the vision of the hydraulic squashing machine it down to lean convenience . Of course, the idea was that the new iPad can help you do all this - compose music, draw, design, game, manage your health and all the rest.

It’s not even a new claim. So why this backlash?

Internet mobs are strange, granted. Perhaps people are tired of seeing wanton waste. Perhaps they are a little triggered by destruction since there is a lot of that going on right now. Perhaps some took it as a suggestion that old ways are superseded and inferior. Perhaps they are sick of Silicon Valley overlords assuming that computers can truly substitute for humans in most endeavors. Perhaps they resent the way digital technology has already taken up so much space – not physically – but in our minds, our communications, our work, economy and also our creativity. The memory of screen-filled lockdowns is a fresh enough nightmare to distrust the idea of an all-encompassing magic machine which is here to make your life easier. Why wrangles pots of paint, or sacrifice floorspace for a bulky piano? Now you can just touch, tap and squiggle on a small rectangle of glass.

Actor Hugh Grant was widely quoted, saying Apple’s ad represents “the destruction of the human experience, courtesy of Silicon Valley” which suggests to me that it was the idea that iPad could replace painting, sculpting, music and the rest that really hit a nerve. Certainly, artists are a bit tetchy over the hype that they will soon be redundant. The writers’ strike, lawsuits from artists whose art was used to train machines.. One Reddit user commented, “a gray industrial press in gray industrial room crushing colorful tools of art into a gray ipad slab without color. Color is only depicted as bleeding out from the press. If that's not a striking metaphor for mega corporations crushing the artists and art then I don't know what is.”

But I’m not sure that they should worry too much.

The first music video generated entirely by prompting AI happened to be released just a few days ago and there is something soulless about it. Not just the slight alien goofiness of the way characters move, nor even the frenetic nature of it (par for the course with music videos) but the most interesting bits were the stylization (human) the editing (human) and the pedestrian storyline (human) – teenage ratbags marry and start a family and walk into some sort of weird green hill. It will help fill the internet with content and humans will project meaning onto it, but for passing on values or capturing something of the human experience, there’s no way.

Apple has said it will not show the ad on television as it had intended and pleaded guilty to tone-deafness. But it’s not the first time they’ve (wrongly) assumed their tech would be universally loved and embraced. When the Vision Pro headset was released, I wrote that Silcon Valley seems to have “the strange idea that we've reached a kind of "peak humanity" by never having to leave our desk, couch or house.” Yet if there’s anything the pandemic years have taught us is that people need to do things with their hands, to be outdoors and the in-real-life company of other humans.

Whatever machines get up to in the future, and no matter how amazing they are as tools for human excellence, there will always be some things that only humans can do since we were made by Creator God:

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being..”

No robot can claim that.

One commenter said the ad made them realize they need less technology in their life. So well done, Apple… Now where did I put those paintbrushes?