The New "Virtues" of AI

by Keith D. Stanglin, Executive Director, Center for Christian Studies

I don’t watch much TV, but I confess to getting sucked into a football game now and then.  And despite my best efforts to avoid the advertisements, three ads have recently caught my attention.  To be more specific, they creeped me out.  They are all promoting a feature called “Apple Intelligence,” Apple’s new platform for artificial intelligence.  I’ll describe them in the order in which I saw them.

The first ad introduces a girl—she looks about 16—at some sort of social gathering.  She spots a man at a distance who is walking toward her.  She immediately hides around the corner and addresses her phone thus: “Siri, who’s the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Café Grenel?”  Without delay, Siri replies, “You met Zac.”  So the girl correctly calls his name, “Zac!”  Zac, who must be twice her age, is surprised as he approaches.  “I didn’t think you’d remember me.”  “Of course,” the girl insists, “as soon as I saw you, I’m like, it’s Zac; nobody walks like Zac.”  Breaking the fourth wall, she then pays the camera a quick, smiling glance, while the song “Genius” plays.  This final scene is the trademark template for the other ads.

The second ad features a group of executives sitting around a conference table in a board room, with their open laptops and papers in front of them, ready for a serious discussion of the prospectus.  “I trust everyone has read the prospectus?” asks the boss.  While most give an affirming nod or grunt, one executive has zoned out into his computer screen and doesn’t even answer.  So the boss raises his voice, “Lance!  The prospectus?”  Lance comes to attention and concocts an obvious lie: “Oh, yes, it was wonderful.”  The boss, calling Lance’s bluff, then asks him to take everyone through the prospectus. 

At a loss, and stunned for a moment, Lance gathers himself and proceeds to back himself and his rolling desk chair out of the room.  (The scene is clever and well played.)  In the hallway, Lance springs into action on his laptop, and, within about seven seconds, he has run the prospectus through Apple Intelligence, which has summarized the prospectus in three succinct bullet points.  Lance rolls back into the room, announces that he’s ready, and stares smugly into the camera, while the soundtrack now declares him a genius.

The third ad opens with two girls bringing birthday presents to their dad.  Both presents are hand-crafted and homemade.  One is a wooden box of some sort, and the other is his hammer with his initials now finely carved in the handle.  “Did you do this yourself?” he asks one daughter.  “Yeah, I had a great teacher.”  While this is going on, mom, who clearly forgot about his birthday, has been typing “woodworking with kids” on her phone, whose Apple Intelligence instantly gathers old photos of the girls working with dad.  With perfect timing, she hands him the phone with the scrolling photos, announcing, “This is from me!”  And as dad and the girls stare at the pictures, now mom walks away victorious, the latest genius.

Interestingly, these ads cannot hide—indeed, they amplify—the true colors of artificial intelligence (AI) and what it promotes.  First, the ads reward laziness, for that is what AI enables.  The girl cannot remember the name of the man she had a meeting with a couple of months ago.  And now she won’t ever have to remember another name again, thanks to Siri, which apparently has recorded and kept track of the what, when, where, and who of every conversation she has had.  And if she need not remember, then she won’t remember.  For the same reason you don’t know your children’s cell phone numbers—you don’t have to—anyone who uses this app will struggle to remember the names of all but their closest family and friends. 

Lance’s sloth is evident from the opening scene.  He couldn’t care less about being in the work meeting, and he didn’t do his homework for the meeting.  But it’s okay, since AI bailed him out with three instantaneous bullet points.  Laziness got him in the jam, and what got him out of it was equally lazy.  There’s really no need to read or process or recapitulate anything, on your own, ever again.

And mom’s forgetfulness of dad’s birthday is rewarded with a smattering of photos on the phone given as a substitute for a thoughtful gift.  Her paltry gesture is juxtaposed to the daughters’ true labors of love, and the message is that the former—the last-minute, thoughtless, artificially produced slideshow—somehow compares with or even surpasses the latter.  If this is so, then why spend countless hours creating something with your hands?

Second, these ads are all predicated on dishonesty.  The girl hides in order to ask Siri, and then she lies about remembering Zac’s name.  Lance lies first about having read the prospectus, and then he must leave the room to hide and use the AI.  Then his entire presentation is not his summary at all; it’s a sham.  The mom is hidden away in the kitchen ordering up her slideshow, presenting it to dad as if she accomplished something comparably meaningful because she put time and thought into it.  But she didn’t.  After each deception is complete, the protagonist gives the viewer a direct smile, because we know and are all in on the game.  The whole AI enterprise trades on mendacity, people presenting things as their own that are not, and presenting themselves as people they are not.

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if each of these advertisements had a believable sequel.  In other words, what would the actual results be?  Zac would come to find out that his new friend can’t remember anyone’s name, and so he would correctly infer that she was AI cheating and also lying about it at their second meeting.  Dad and the daughters would watch the photos, give the phone back to mom, and then they might ask what she really got for him, only to discover that there was nothing there but a distraction.  In these instances, AI is not enhancing the relationships but creating a fleeting and false sense of caring.

The sequel to Lance’s ad is perhaps the most revealing thing about AI: In the next scene, Lance would not be congratulated but terminated.  On the one hand, if Lance’s boss and colleagues were not impressed by his special combination of laziness and deception, he would be disciplined or fired for both.  On the other hand, if Lance’s summary was successful because the AI bullet points were sufficient, and the AI tool was known and appreciated for what it is, the very next scene would have the boss realizing that Lance is just taking up space and is unnecessary as an interpreter of documents.  Either way, Lance has just lost his job.  For someone like Lance to advocate for AI is like a truck driver advocating for driverless trucks.  Yet it is happening in nearly every field—humans are becoming increasingly obsolete, voluntarily ceding not only physical but also intellectual ground to machines.

These ads are not anomalies.  It is hard to see a commercial break without at least one ad featuring AI products to make life simpler.  The products now coming from Apple and their competitors, like their products of the last two decades, continue to reshape the human race into something sub-human, and the population not only goes along with it but also embraces it, never stopping to ask about the negative consequences until it’s too late.

I’m well aware that there’s more to the AI conversation that what is revealed in these ads.  But these ads reveal plenty.  Human laziness and deceit are not bugs of AI but features; the old vices are the new virtues.  The purveyors of AI intend to form us into a physically and intellectually lazy, foolish, deceptive, and easily deceived people, enslaved to the device—that is the obvious end, and therefore it is the goal.  Is anyone else creeped out by that?