Was Apple’s new ad written by AI?

What would you say the favourite part of your job is? Is it spending time with your lovely colleagues? Getting to work on projects that give you a sense of fulfilment? Or is it picking up the payslip so you can survive as a regular functioning adult for one more month before jumping back on the never-ending treadmill of economic necessity?

Whatever answer you gave, I’m willing to bet part of my payslip that it wasn’t “having to use super formal business language”.

You know what I mean. The buzzwords. The acronyms. The endless, long-winded, weirdly structured sentences, like everything you write is a plea to a benevolent uncle in a Jane Austen novel to release some of your funds forthwith.

In fact, it might even be the case that you secretly wish you could do away with all of that, and just write like a normal person, like you do in your WhatsApp groups.

In which case, Apple’s new Apple Intelligence (or, you know, “AI” as it wishes its friends would call it) is going to be a bit of a mixed bag for you.

Good news: you won’t have to write like a robot anymore.

Bad news: the robots are going to write like a robot for you instead.

Don’t believe me? Just watch their latest ad:

Computer should say no

To summarise: the office schlub is so bored that in utter desperation he decides to email his boss about the project he’s supposed to be working on. He types his little message, and it sounds exactly like it would if he was actually talking in real life.

Then, just before he hits send, he pauses. Is there a glaring typo? A monstrous grammatic error? Has he hilariously replaced his boss’s name with “Hi Mum”?

No. He realises – just in time – that he needs to make it sound more proper. No panic! All he has to do is tap the button marked ‘professional’ (it has a tiny briefcase icon, so you know it means business, in both senses of the phrase). Hey presto, suddenly it’s Very Serious: all “require” this and “consideration” that.

It is – and I cannot emphasise this enough – absolutely awful. It is so bad that it is literally the type of thing that clients pay us to fix.

Here’s where it gets really wild though. We see the boss read the email, and instead of having a normal reaction like, has my employee been kidnapped and replaced by an imposter, he’s…impressed? And now sees our schlub in a new, better, more financially lucrative light?

Surely a more realistic and enjoyable version of this advert would show our protagonist pairing up with an AI who, like Cyrano (“Cyber-o?”) de Bergerac, writes everything for him until our guy either a) wins the love of his boss and marries him or b) gets done for catfishing.

Either one of which would be a better story than this one – the one where the only logical conclusion is that your boss is an idiot impressed by anyone with a thesaurus, and that to get ahead, you must ingest and regurgitate the longest, oddest words in that thesaurus.

Welcome to the treehouse (of horror)

If nobody apart from a few weirdos really enjoys writing in this way, why do we persist in doing it? The answer is: because everyone else is. We’re social animals, and we care about what others think of us – especially if they’re higher up the hierarchy.

That’s how the idea of professionalism is inculcated, cult-style. Just on the language front, we are taught the secret code words (EOP! Circle back! Upon further consideration!) that will give us access to the treehouse. And once we’re safely in there with the cool kids, we don’t want to do anything that might risk our hallowed position ten feet off the ground.

“But,” I hear you cry from your desk, “if I don’t write in this way, won’t everyone think I’m an industrial-strength, weapons-grade thicko?”

Possibly, but not because of your writing, and here’s some proof.

In Daniel M. Oppenheimer’s “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly” (absolute club banger of a title), he presented people with the same bit of writing, written up in increasingly complex ways.

He then asked the participants to judge how intelligent they thought the authors of each piece were. The findings were clear: readers consistently judged writers using the most complicated words as the least – not most – intelligent.

So in reality, the boss in the ad wouldn’t be impressed by the smartness of that email. He’d be appalled by how dumb it was.

Bad apple

There’s a key event in the mythology of Apple, a company whose touchstone is combining innovation with accessibility. It’s 2007, and Steve Jobs is up on stage, starting his presentation. People are excited, sure, but there’s no indication that they are about to witness what could be reasonably described as the best product launch of all time, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Why is it so special? Well, it’s not just one product being launched, but three:

“The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device.”

He repeats them, one by one, faster and faster: “An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone… are you getting it?”

It takes a few moments, but the crowd does get it. They laugh. They cry. They decide there and then to name their next born child Steve. It’s not three separate things at all.

It’s all of them in one.

I couldn’t help but think of that iPhone launch when I saw Apple’s ad for AI. Look back to the bit where our protagonist makes the fateful decision to transform his writing into crud. You might have missed it, but there’s three different options he can choose from: Friendly, Professional and Concise.

Wouldn’t combining all three of those be the truly innovative, accessible option? You don’t have to artificially pick one of three arbitrary styles, but get the best of all of them in one:

Friendly strips out all the awful formality (instead of burying you in it), Professional keeps an eye out for spelling or grammar whoppers, and Concise just erases anything you don’t need.

Instead, Apple will reinforce the borders between these categories, further promoting the idea that you should leave your personality at the door when you clock in. The company that once made a name for itself with the slogan “Think different” now wants you to “Write identical”.

None of this is to say that there isn’t a role for AI in writing (whether we like it or not).

But what we don’t need is exactly what Apple are offering – a corporate tool that makes you sound like a corporate tool.

Written by Chris Lawes, Senior Writer at Definition