Where were you when you first saw Apple’s 2024 advert for the iPad Pro: ‘the thinnest product they’ve ever created’?
That’s what people will ask each other in 50 years. Maybe that’s what their descendants will ask each other in 500. A cataclysmic world event. A mission statement for the future. A giant hydraulic press stamping on a human soul forever- all art, craft, culture and knowledge obsolete, compressed into the flattest tablet device the world has ever seen. A state of the art music studio; a human bust; an easel; an Angry Bird, an emoji. Nothing is special, nothing is spared.
This advert has made a lot of people very sad and angry. The replies on Twitter to Apple CEO Tim Cook’s unveiling of the advert were almost universally damning. There was lots of speculation along the lines of ‘I bet someone is getting fired right now’. Probably more accurately, there were suggestions that the whole ad campaign was a deliberate provocation. As of Friday 10th May, Bloomberg reports that Apple has pulled the ad from TV broadcasts, saying they ‘got the tone wrong’ or something to that effect.
There is something pretty arrogant about the advert’s concept. The juxtaposition of the upbeat tones of Sonny & Cher’s ‘All I Ever Need Is You’ with a bleak scene of ruthless destruction is obviously intended to shock and, yes, perhaps insult. You can really imagine the drawl of the director talking at a bar about getting back from an ‘epic shoot’ and describing what’s ultimately a rather basic concept (destroying everything? Wow!) in excited tones to politely interested people.
One thing I’ve been wondering about is how this advert would have gone down a decade ago. I’m sure it would have provoked some outrage but I doubt there would have been as much of a sense of hurt and betrayal among the creative community. What are the differences in mood between 2014 and now?
Incidentally, May 2014 was when I first started freelancing. It’s, by definition, not been an easy journey at points and there have been many twists, turns, cul-de-sacs and the occasional non-Euclidean leap forward. I’ve never really contemplated giving up on it as there’s always been a sense, no matter how lumbering or erratic the journey has been, that I’m moving ‘forward’- both in terms of the opportunities that have come up and my pride in the work I’ve created. But this certainty in my choice of path has always rested on the continued existence of the intended destination. This year, with AI music generation services – Suno, Udio, Google LM etc – really upping their game, the mood among composer communities oscillates routinely between apocalyptic and defiant. A new AI music generating model is released – a fresh salvo of gunfire from Big Tech – followed by a return volley of, ‘actually, it’s still not particularly great, is it?’. Slowly but surely, these criticisms are evolving into ‘but it’ll be really hard for the editor to make tweaks’ or ‘how can they be sure it will not infringe copyright?’. The aesthetic criticisms are becoming the practical as people’s fears of obsolescence sharpen.
I must confess to feeling some of these oscillations quite deeply within my soul and, as a consequence, I’ve bowed out of most of the forums I used to enjoy reading. The prospect of something completely outside of my control – the continuing encroachment of technology and centralisation on people’s livelihoods – undoing a decade of hard work and uncertainty (and a lifetime of musical curiosity and training) is, to be blunt, quite upsetting and, while I don’t think that’s going to happen, it’s not pleasant to contemplate. I wrote an article last month arguing that no one will ever truly artistically value AI generated music, however close it gets to ‘the real thing’, because there’s no human journey to connect it to. However, a vlogger might not care if they just need to rustle up a lo-fi beat to stick underneath an unboxing video. In the words of Okja’s Nancy Mirando: ‘If it’s cheap, they’ll eat it’. The only consolation is that those kinds of tracks were so cheap already. Royalty-free music may already be on borrowed time, but if Performing Royalty Organisations, collectives, unions and publishers don’t get their wits together in time, there are reasons to be afraid that it’ll become much harder to make a living from any music – harder than it has been up to this point.
Artists have always worried that they’re not going to ‘make it’, or that no one likes their work, or that the people who like their work won’t pay for it (hello Spotify!). Have they ever worried about themselves and all artists being obsolete before? Not to this extent!
This current climate of fear surrounding AI – and, by association, Big Tech – is the backdrop for the reaction to Apple’s advert. It is a blithe assurance of artists’ fears – ‘we’re coming for you!’ – a mockery of those artists for caring so much. It’s a gleeful rallying cry for Silicon Valley’s true believers against sentimentality. It’s a nudge nudge, wink wink to everyone involved.
And honestly? The best thing to do is ignore it. Knowing how blatant the intention is means you can reckon with the idea itself for the falsehood you know it to be. There’ll be maybe a couple of years of this – a corporate hammering home of the idea that art is pointless, self-indulgent and replicable through 0s and 1s. Maybe even that it’s somehow undemocratic or sour grapes to dismiss AI art practitioners. Just rest with your knowledge that this is not the case – and take comfort that most others will know this deep down, too. The AI evangelism will burn itself out, as will most of the incredibly expensive to run computers.
What this advert did unwittingly portray, which I think we should feel concerned about, is an overall ‘flattening’ of the artistic world we live in. All the poetry, art and photography we ever need condensed into centralised, algorithmically dependent social media feeds on flat screens. The entire history of recorded music and film available to play, or at least skip through, at the click of a button. The agony of choice between one unsatisfying thing and the next. The increasing subjugation of artistic intent beneath short blasts of humour required to get people to pay attention in the first place.
This flattening has already been happening for years and one of humanity’s great challenges is going to be figuring out how to reverse it.