Apple Intelligence Adverts, Vacuum Cleaners and Getting the Gist : AI and the Promise of Efficiency
- sreeshachakra
- 7 hours ago
- 4 min read
The new series of advertisements from Apple, for Apple Intelligence portray its generative AI tools as easy ways out of both professional and personal scenarios wherein one is not willing to put in any sort of effort. In one advertisement, a project leader is unwilling to go through the presentation made for him before an important meeting, and instead riffs off using Apple’s Writing Tool which is able to summarise any document, email or message in seconds. In another advertisement, the protagonist has forgotten her husband’s birthday, and AI generates a slideshow of pictures of the family using Apple’s Memory AI feature. The rest of the adverts follow this similar formula, such as an actor accepting a movie by reading the AI summary of the script, or a lazy employee writing a professional email using generative AI, all followed by a score which contains the lyrics “I am genius.”
What is AI saving time for?
AI has been marketed and advertised time and time again as irreplaceable due to its efficiency and resourcefulness in grating tasks, and proponents of AI cite these reasons as one of the leading factors in its necessity. However, through the series of advertisements for Apple Intelligence, the company advertises AI as an easy way out of almost any task - from grating ones at the office, to the arts, and as well as family events. What then, is the question, is AI efficiently saving us time for? If we are relying on it for reading and writing, for office jobs, for analyses and also for human relationships, what does that leave us to do with the rest of our time?
It is not only Apple which is pushing for this over-dependency on new technology, but interestingly, also apps and companies that rely on things being done or consumed in a certain manner. YouTube has recently integrated AI into a large number of its pre-existing features, including AI-generated summaries of videos, replies to comments, naming sections of videos, et cetera. YouTube runs on its content being consumed and the viewers forming certain bonds with the creators, but has decided to outsource all of that interaction, which keeps the app active and alive, to AI. This is also not to mention how its algorithm pushes AI-generated slop onto people’s home pages and the Shorts tab.
Recent online discourse about using AI tools to “read” the classics, watering down grand narratives to soluble and digestible summaries have also hit the mainstream discussions surrounding artificial intelligence. If the technology is indeed freeing up time by doing grind work, then again, should that time not be better used in immersing oneself in the arts rather than “getting the gist” of Dostoevsky or Homer? We argue that boring tasks distract us from the humanities, but once that is solved, why do we treat the arts like another boring task to trudge through and get over with?
So if we are not using the time that AI apparently saves us to interact with loved ones or to consume media, what exactly are we using it for?
The Vacuum Cleaner Paradox : AI and the Promise of Efficiency
When the vacuum cleaner dominated American households in the 20th century, it entered homes with a grand rhetoric of freeing up time from the mundane routine of housewives and housekeepers. But it never kept up to its promise - it only altered the realities of the people which it sought to help, raising expectations about the housewife and the state of the domestic residence. Homes were expected to be more beautified and more shiny than they ever were before. This pattern is not only applicable to domestic appliances, but also functioned in the advent of emails. The technology that promised to lessen the load on office-workers only created invisible strings for them, causing issues such as boundary-less professional and personal life, to name one.
AI’s rapid integration into professional spaces, touted to enhance efficiency, seems to be taking the route of this kind of paradox as well. It comes with utopian promises to shorten workweeks, lessen workloads, and allow one to focus on meaningful and creativity-based ventures, but the marketing strategies of its billion-dollar proponents seem to suggest otherwise. Not only does it take away from any meaningful interactions, as the advertisements encourage users to lie to and about everyone and everything, but also will simultaneously face reactionary backlash from the corporates and social duties it targets, making things harder and more unattainable for everyone.
None of this is to suggest that AI will not contribute to efficiency and attainability in any manner and will not take off the burden of grueling tasks - but it is also unwise to ignore the multiple cautionary tales of our past. The worker who was in charge of a single presentation may now have to edit, refine and present five AI-generated ones. The faster that the work gets done, there is only more work that there is to be done.
Integrating AI Ethically
Bearing in mind the lessons of email, vacuum cleaners and such, it is essential to understand that “efficiency” and “time-management” are deeply rooted into social and cultural understandings of work culture. Workload will only lessen once we lessen our expectation of the corporate work culture, and this also includes what we put into the bracket of “work”. Reading classics, interacting with human-made content, spending meaningful time with loved ones - if these labours of love are also relegated to AI in the name of efficiency, then there is not much that we are left to do with our time. Yahoo! News lists five skills one no longer needs to learn due to AI : and this includes basic and creative skills such as reading, writing, and design. How dystopian.
It is not AI that can save us from the rat-race work culture that the world is embedded in, but the workplace in itself, whether it allows for and gives value to free time, or whether it exists solely to enhance productivity, and other such keywords that grind culture spews at us daily. AI can only change the form and medium of work, but it is up to us to define what work, time well spent and efficiency mean to us.
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