New iPad Ad Essentially Upends Tired AI Creations

Is it true that all press is good press, or is Apple's latest iPad ad – involving a different kind of press – a poorly timed misstep that could actually cost Apple the business of tired creatives? AI?

Because right now, creative people are expressing their disgust at the sight of their tools being blithely destroyed en masse in a hydraulic press to make way for a shiny new tablet. It could just be that it was the wrong message at the wrong time.

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It's nothing new that some ads are annoying, and we all know that a hated ad isn't necessarily ineffective. When I was 12, there were these hamburger commercials showing people loudly shoving hamburgers into their hideous, close-up mouths and sucking their fingers like animals. This whole thing made me want to claw my eyes out. (Actually, they made a lot of people feel that wayI learned that later.) But as my father explained to me at the time, “The point is, they got your attention.”

I heard the underlying message loud and clear: businesses don't have to pretend they respect their customers; all they have to do is get them to part with their money.

It's entirely possible that Apple will encourage its customers to do just that. Yesterday my colleague Chris Taylor pointed out that the new high-end iPad with all the peripherals adds to a $3,000 package of gadgets, and that – sticker shock or not – it's tempting to shell out for something this cool. But he also noted something that he believes is key to this value proposition: the new iPad taps into his fantasies of personal creativity. “Apple knows that our income is always a little more disposable if it can please our budding genius,” he wrote.

With that in mind, I invite you to watch the “Crush” commercial one more time and really think about what it shows you:

All that – the painting, the piano, the trumpet, the arcade machine, the illustrator’s table – do you feel any hostility towards them? Do you want to see it destroyed and symbolically transformed into an Apple device? Does it give you any satisfaction to see record players wiped out and cameras all crushed, brittle and exploded?

And to change things up a bit, take a look at your nearest Apple device and think about the last time you fantasized about crushing that thing. It was yesterday ? It was maybe five minutes ago. Either way, you probably like it less than your guitar, for example.

Almost exactly 40 years ago, Apple released its most famous ad: “1984“, in which a monochrome society of dragging drones is under the spell of a kind of computerized dictator. The prisoners of this terrible society are then freed from their monotony by a hammer-throwing savior representing the Macintosh computer, and a glorious future and colorful.

40 years later, Apple is the world's most valuable company, releasing an ad in which symbols of creativity, color, joy, human passion and play are stacked in the center of a gray concrete void and crushed by an industrialist. machine until they become a small Apple-branded rectangle.

The message is not getting across well.

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And the timing couldn't be worse. Apple is finally which pleases Wall Street by moving to AI – even going as far as accelerate development of a new AI cloud infrastructure project composed of its own proprietary chips. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said during an earnings call last weekApple “believes in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era.”

To that end, yesterday's iPad event contained more use of the term “AI” than any Apple product presentation in recent memory. AI Improvements Are Suddenly Injected into Apple Creation Tools like Photomator, with its ML Enhance tool and a new Isolate Subjects option in Final Cut Pro.

There's no two ways about it: Apple is now an AI company. And with this ad, Apple seems to be making that message heard from a loudspeaker, perhaps a little louder than intended. Audience members who see “Crush” seem to slowly accept this strange new reality.

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The same year, Apple released its “1984” commercial, a short film called The terminator has made its debut, and the folks at Apple might want to take another look at it – or at least (spoiler alert) its final moments. In his heart, The terminator is a love story about the essential qualities of humanity that prevail over artificial intelligence. Was this the concept of love that James Cameron put through a hydraulic press in the finale? Was it creativity? Joy? Passion? No. The film was about the id of humanity, because the cathartic ending of The terminator This is the moment when the hideous artificially intelligent machine was crushed.

It is It's an act of creative destruction that people will always want to see, and if you're currently a tech company, it's probably a good idea to keep that in mind.