Apple Un-intelligence
100% Media 0% Nonsense
Apple is selling AI as a life hack for stupid liars. It’s not a good strategy and it’s distinctly un-Apple.
Treating people like they’re stupid is a really risky strategy.
It’s not because there aren’t a lot of stupid people in the world. Of course there are. How else to explain why more than 60m people tuned in on Friday night to watch 58-year-old convicted rapist Mike Tyson plod around a boxing ring with YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul?
Of course that would turn out to be a flat dud of a spectacle. Of course it was nothing to do with boxing as an actual sport (notably, the Tyson-Paul fight was upstaged by a warm-up women’s bout between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano).
And yet, if you looked at the marketing for this “must-see” event, you’d have thought this was the fight of the century. Many who gave up their Friday night to watch this in Texas were sorely disappointed; there was audible booing as the “contest” persisted and spectators were seen leaving early.
Netflix once set the media world alight with original series like Orange is the New Black, Stranger Things and House of Cards — the writing, directing and acting quality of these shows created a super-magnet for streaming subscribers.
But Saturday’s debacle was a far cry from a distinctively high-quality Netflix experience. There were widespread reports of the live stream glitching as the platform clearly suffered from bandwidth issues. As well as having to sit through a “loading” screen at various points, viewers were also subjected to among, other unpleasantries, Tyson’s bum.
If this was a dress rehearsal for Netflix’s live coverage of NFL games next month, co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos should be worried.
Talking down is doomed to fail
And yet there’s a big difference between acknowledging lots of people are stupid versus actually treating them as such.
It’s generally not a good idea to condescend. Particularly if you’re a media owner, advertiser or a tech company that wants to promote itself as a brand with mass appeal.
Leaving aside the obvious reason — it’s offensive — it’s also ineffective.
As well as numerous psychological explanations for this, there is a very specific bias known as the Dunning-Kruger effect in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their ability. For example, you probably assume you’re a better driver than most people on the road, or you’re probably a better parent, or that you can spot a better deal when doing Christmas shopping.
This isn’t just an attempt to make ourselves feel better; it’s very difficult for individuals to imagine what “average” looks like when faced with a large dataset.
This tendency is a mirror opposite of the “wisdom of crowds”, the phenomenon in which you ask a bunch of people how many marbles are in a jar and the average of their guesses become more accurate as you ask a greater number of people. Individuals get things wrong because we’re riddled with biases; crowds are wise because the biases are smoothed out.
So it was clearly an individual who decided to base Apple’s Intelligence marketing campaign on the idea that people are stupid liars and need their AI-enabled phones to bail them out of trouble.
Rotten Apple
For weeks now, Apple has plagued the global advertising world with these reprehensible ads depicting everyday white-collar workers as dumb, deceitful and possibly even deranged.
Take Last of Us star Bella Ramsey, whose three appearances in the ads are as depressing as anything you’re likely to see in this year’s festive marketing.
In one, as her family gathers over a tiny grave to mourn the death of her sister’s beloved pet fish, her father begins to give a terrible eulogy, getting the fish’s name wrong and stumbling over his words. Bella swoops to the rescue by creating a “memory movie” using Apple Intelligence.
Or the one where she fails to prepare for a lunch meeting with her agent and needs Apple Intelligence’s email summary feature to help her blag her way through the conversation. Is this the kind of behaviour Apple would expect of its own employees? Don’t prepare for meetings and lie your way through them when you’re about to get caught?
Or the one where Ramsey uses Siri to scour her calendar because she’s bumped into someone whose name she can’t remember. Why bother developing higher-order social skills (forgetting someone’s name after one meeting is hardly a crime!) when you can use AI to pretend you have an eidetic memory?
What kind of misanthropic misery guts would pitch an idea like this?
Hammer looking for a fail
Even the way the ads end with the Krizz Kaliko lyric “I am genius!” is classic Dunning-Kruger.
These are the ads you should talk about the next time your ear is bent by some glassy-eyed tech evangelist wanging on about how AI represents the next industrial revolution or similar unfalsifiable drivel.
Because, whether they meant to do this or not, the world’s most valuable tech business has perfectly demonstrated why AI tools have very limited use cases.
Whatever benefit is being demonstrated in these ads is a far cry from marketing the microwave or the dishwasher — appliances that could clearly save people lots of time and, in some cases, do a better job at handling specific tasks than we can. These products free people from doing manual labour so we can spend time having fun or performing higher-value tasks.
But what problem is Apple Intelligence really trying to solve?
Why do we need a tool to rewrite our emails in a certain level of formality or tone? Isn’t it part of our responsibility as humans in a digital age to know how to navigate such routine tasks ourselves?
Why do we need a tool to summarise our text messages and emails? Isn’t it a core skill as information-economy workers to be able to scan, synthesise and analyse these messages ourselves?
Why do we need a tool to turn our phone’s images and movies into a montage? Well, I’ll give Apple that one — that’s pretty cool…
In general, it’s going to be a tough sell to convince consumers, or even information-economy professionals, that we need to sub-contract our critical thinking abilities to a clunky AI assistant. Whether Siri, Google, Cortana, ChatGPT, Jarvis, Hal — whatever — becomes less clunky is not the point.
As I ranted about last week, it’s the ability to think that will ensure you remain valuable in a world increasingly inhabited by AI. The Apple of Steve Jobs would have likely been more sensitive to this and would have pitched Apple Intelligence as helping smart humans create more time and space to be even smarter.
Why Jobs appreciated design in a way that his computer rivals didn’t is because he understood that tech is an enabler of human creativity and ingenuity, not a replacement. People who take pride in themselves and their work take pride in great design.
Jobs never treated his customers like morons and neither should his successor Tim Cook.
Omar Oakes is UK editor-in-chief of The Media Leader. 100% Media 0% Nonsense is a weekly column about the state of media and advertising
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