Apple apologizes for iPad ad that reflects fears of generative AI
Updated May 11, 2024:
Apple is apologizing for its iPad Pro commercial, “Crush,” which has been widely criticized by creative professionals. The commercial showed creative tools and objects, such as a piano, a camera, and paint cans, being destroyed in an industrial shredder. This was intended as a metaphor for the creative potential of the new, ultra-thin iPad Pro, but it also symbolized many of the fears that artists associate with generative AI (see below).
The goal was to demonstrate the myriad ways users can express themselves and bring their ideas to life with iPad. But Tor Myhren, the company’s vice president of marketing communications, told Adage that the ad missed the mark. The ad has been posted on YouTube and X, but will not air on television as planned.
Original article from May 10, 2024:
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Apple shows how not to advertise in the age of generative AI – unless you want to be deliberately provocative. In a new ad for the iPad Pro, Apple shows a hydraulic press crushing musical instruments, classical sculptures, and painting tools, leaving only the sleek iPad as a substitute for human creativity. The ad strikes a nerve at a time when artists, writers, and musicians fear for their jobs and protest the unsolicited collection of data online for AI training, which they see as a compression of human knowledge and talent into a “black box.” Apple’s message of being able to do everything with an iPad, a black box, seems symbolic of the fears of generative AI. Hugh Grant described the commercial on X as the “destruction of the human experience”, with other artists joining the criticism.
