Is it just critics and writers on the internet not taking these ads as jokes, or are normal people also reading them as serious? That seems to me the key question re: whether these are mistakes.
They're clearly meant to be humorous, and everyone gets that. However they are truly terrible ads. They paint Apple's features with a negative tone and are the sort of lazy, low-effort entrant that you expect from gambling or crypto sites. Just garbage ads.
I know nothing about the ad business, but I feel like Apple must have engaged with an irregular agency for this. They're so out of character for the company.
It's selling something that costs close to $1000 US. Humorous is fine, but couching the entire thing as a joke makes one wonder what is substantively different about it than last year's model.
Everyone understands they trying really hard to be humorous. You're doing a classic "you must not get it" bit when people find an attempt at humour stupid if not distasteful. Yes, we all get it, yet they're still stupid and the sort of ad I expect from Microsoft back in the Windows Phone days.
As another comment mentioned, they're tone deaf if not dystopian: If this is the best image Apple could contrive for their AI features....Jesus Christ.
As to the perpetually lazy bit, the ads are literally predicated on making a "humorous" situation around a thoughtless self-involved sociopath and the office clown. Supremely out of character for Apple, and they gave their agency too much rope.
> You're doing a classic "you must not get it" bit when people find an attempt at humour stupid if not distasteful
I’m not, the couple links I’ve seen here, including this one, have been written as if the ads aren’t intended to be funny, and judge (and describe) them as if the ads are trying to straightforwardly communicate something, rather than being a particular common sort of humorous ad—and, perhaps, failing at what they’re trying to say and communicating the wrong thing, or being bad for other reasons, but that’s not how this piece comes across.
I’m not wondering if everyone who doesn’t like them didn’t understand them, but whether the ones bothering to blog about it are misreading the ads? Has it just been the links I’ve happened to have followed on the topic here?
I think of AI as being roughly the same moral caliber as cigarettes. Apple has never had to make a cigarette ad before, so it doesn't surprise me that they're not good at it. It's hard to come out right and say, "We've bet billions of dollars that we can convince you not to think for yourself anymore."
The product is asking your to give up your creativity, your will for self improvement, your potential to excel. Once you externalize these parts of your brain to someone else who you have to pay to think for you, after a long enough time you will have nothing at all to offer society yourself.
I agree, and they also present AI as something accessible to regular people for their everyday minor situations. "Huh, if the office knucklehead can use this to write a professional sounding email, maybe that could help me make my decent emails even better."
I'm thinking they're aiming to capitalize on mixed feelings people have about AI. These ads let the viewers have their social objects to diss AI - "haha, AI is for the losers like in that Apple ad", while at the same time making them say, in the privacy of their thoughts, "but I am not a loser and I could use such functions too!".
You're not telling the consumer he'll be a joke. You're telling them that even if they were humorously villainous, they'd get away with it and everyone would be okay with it, since it worked out so well.
Idk as someone who doesnt really consume a lot of commercials, the most interesting thing here to me is that they are funny ads. I can't speak to the article's critique itself, but I think the choice here of going whimsical/funny is pretty telling of what all this AI stuff is ultimately going to resolve down to for the consumer/user. Nobody wants to be OpenAI anymore, all their profundity is lost on everyone except people on this particular website we are on. It just seems like going that route is starting to feel like not a great bet, I think, to the older, more mainstream companies in the space. They always see which way the wind is blowing, they can pay to.
They read very obviously as jokes, but still strike me as distasteful and tonedeaf. If they were in a satire of apple, they could be funny, but the idea of AI slop infecting even family gifts is just so, so dark and depressing it's hard to see why they thought it could sell phones.
