Apple’s new iPad commercial is the perfect visualization of everything that might be wrong with GenAI

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.