What Do Commercials About A.I. Really Promise?

If a recent crop of commercials touting the benefits of artificial intelligence is any indication, lots of Americans these days feel unduly burdened by the demands of everyday cognition. Apparently, it’s asking way too much to expect a human to figure out how to make a small repair, or write a note to a friend, or plan a meal to feed a child. Let alone read.

I’ve got a perverse favorite among these ads, for Apple Intelligence. (You can look it up on YouTube, in an archival effort by Apple that I would kibosh if I ran the company, but who’s asking me?) A sharp-looking Black man of maybe fifty named Lance sits down at a drab, clean conference table full of colleagues. Somebody asks him if he’s read a “prospectus,” and Lance decides to lie about it. Of course he read the prospectus! “Oh, yes,” he says, his face reeking of guilty and guileless dishonesty. “It was wonderful.” As these things go, he’s asked to offer a synopsis to the rest of the team. Then, crisis established, comes a bit of surrealist slapstick nonsense. In full view of everybody, Lance slowly scoots off in his rolly chair into a hallway, where he consults Apple’s A.I. about the prospectus that’s already sitting right there on his laptop. The thing spits out a few summarizing bullet points, and Lance, newly confident, slowly rolls back to his spot at the table, ready to contribute. “O.K., guys,” he says, his confused colleagues looking on, “let’s get into the prospectus.”

The spot plays as a joke: Lance isn’t exactly a hero, and neither are his largely silent co-workers. But, still, the point is to sell us something, less a consumer item or a user interface than a life style unmarred by pesky intellectual tasks like reading a text and then verbalizing what you read. When I was a kid, people were always telling Black boys they had to be twice as good—at comprehending, at composing, at thinking, at speaking—than the other faces around the table, lest they be banished from the aspiring classes altogether. Maybe Lance is evidence of progress: be ostentatiously mediocre, even forget how to read—who needs it?!—and succeed. The young Frederick Douglass, enslaved, riskily contravening the laws of his time, learned to read from young white boys in Baltimore. Literacy was a symbol for the larger freedom Douglass would later achieve. But those days are over, right? Lay that struggle down once and for all.

Lance seems to be some kind of middle manager, of unclear authority. He’s achieved enough seniority to speak aloud at meetings, instead of, say, writing down the minutes (another role that A.I. cheerfully promises to abrogate; if you want it to, it’ll pay attention on your behalf and take your notes), but he’s still sufficiently subordinate to be put on the spot, called on without previous consent or forewarning. High-ranking executives these days sometimes play the role of so-called “creatives,” supposedly executing corporate and technological maneuvers with the sensitivity of artists. But a guy like Lance is a train on a track, playing out his career with a deterministic energy. When he’s called on, he answers: that’s the gig.

He doesn’t look like he glories in his work. I’m not mad at him for squeezing past a homework assignment or two. A new ad for the note-taking A.I. tool Plaud, powered by GPT and other reasoning tools, shows a Lance-like office drone drowning in jargon at a meeting he’s taking notes for: “KPI,” “optimize,” “ROI,” “stakeholders,” “deliverables.” Then he placidly presses the button on a little toy that starts recording and transcribing what people in the room are saying, and then offering “instant insights.” So many of these new gadgets are straightforwardly presented as salves for the massive ennui that plays bass notes beneath the music of contemporary corporate culture. The preferred state, it seems, is a zoned-out semi-presence, the worker accounted for in body but absent in spirit.

I do wonder what else Lance has got to do, what freedom he thinks he’s winning by allowing his powers of thought to be supplanted by some whirring machine. Does a person with this much contempt for texts by day insist on reading aloud to his kids at night? (A spot for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon features a dad so shaken by the momentary absence of his wife—she’s working late—that he has to ask A.I. what to feed his children. It also helps him “create” a story to read at bedtime. No domestic improv for these types.) Does he check out the paper and catch up on current events? Does he carry on deep conversations with his spouse? Does he go to an Elks Lodge or a community-board meeting or a church or a soup kitchen to kibbitz with his neighbors and make sure they’re doing all right? Does this fella even have friends?

I don’t know. That kind of stuff takes effort. To me he looks sort of sad. I can more easily imagine Lance in bed at night, his face lit up by the screen of the same laptop from work, just a browser tab over from that poor, unread prospectus, placing semi-automated online bets on sporting events he may or may not watch and will almost certainly not attend in person. The implicit idea of commercials like this one is that by spending less energy on thinking, you’ll get more time to act. But in what way? That part seldom comes up.

It used to be somewhat more obvious that the ability to think was the mark of the human animal, not a tedious backstage task but the entire substance of our tragicomic show. The drama of reasoning—applying abstract principles to real dilemmas, starting in one mental region and ending up in another faraway place, changing one’s mind, undergoing a conversion of the heart—is the admittedly humble glory of our species. It’s not always fun. Filling up a blank page is a daunting symbol for the tough challenge posed by this sort of freedom, which might be why new “large language model” concerns seem so dead set on identifying writing as an adversary for the humans of the future to finally vanquish. (My colleague Hua Hsu recently reported on what this mind-set is already doing to the practice of writing at institutions of higher learning.)

Thinking’s our whole thing. A company that promises—however jokily—to do your thinking for you is, not even subtly, also threatening, somewhere down the line, to scoot you off the stage for good. Does Lance think he’s going to have that seemingly decent, if boring, job for long? I don’t think his laptop thinks so. ♦