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Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Apple
For the last few years, tech companies have been telling a pretty simple story to investors: that their technology will be able to automate a lot of tasks, including joblike tasks; that their AI will continue to get more powerful and sophisticated; that they need a lot of money, sure, but that if they succeed, the upside is basically infinite. In the narrow sense, it’s a pretty good pitch that has allowed these companies to raise many billions of dollars. The problem is that this is money talking to money — big new companies talking to big old companies about efficiency and productivity and cost-saving and returns. In other words, it doesn’t really translate. To people outside of a small elite loop, the prospect of automating jobs at a level that justifies epochal levels of investment might fall somewhere between boring and threatening.
For the general public, tech companies need a better story than “we’re coming for all the jobs,” which probably explains why they’re doing so many ads. For the second Super Bowl in a row, viewers saw multiple AI spots from tech firms, this time including Google, Meta, and, in a first for the company, OpenAI. Microsoft and Apple have been working out their marketing messages for a while now, too, with promotional videos and TV spots and social-media clips galore. The products they’re advertising are similar — general-purpose AI tools that can answer questions and generate media for you — but their approaches have been fairly different. OpenAI’s ad was a broad brand-awareness campaign in the long tradition of vague and self-serious ads from large firms — tech, pharma, chemical, whatever — that portray their products as broadly synonymous with human progress. (It also bears a passing resemblance to a Guinness send-up of such ads from nearly two decades ago):
A Microsoft ad from the last Super Bowl positioned AI as a force for individual professional empowerment, suggesting that the benefits of mass automation might accrue not just to AI providers like Microsoft but to early-adopting individuals, too:
A more recent Apple Intelligence ad tells a similar story, except about assholes who suck at their jobs:
This year, Google returned to its strategy of making tear-jerking vignettes about things like “being alive” and “having a family.” In its Super Bowl ad, a stay-at-home dad rehearses his first job interview in years with Gemini. Like the Microsoft ads, this one is about how AI automation might be used by rather than on workers, and like previous Google ads, it’s stirring. That said, if I were trying to figure out how to reframe mass automation as individually empowering and counter growing unease about AI’s effect on jobs, I might not invite viewers to dwell too much on late-career unemployment and job-hunting:
Amazon’s automation pitch, in the form of its first promotional video for a major update to Alexa, is more focused, combining a general chatbot ad with a pitch for automation in the home, in both the “turn off your lights with your voice” sense and the “imagine your home and family as a more efficient business” sense:
Meta, for its part, leaned into the simplest pitch for consumer AI — a pitch that chatbots are pretty good at making themselves, once you try one: Here’s a computer you can talk to, and which will generate text and images for you. Taking into account Meta’s market position, though, the pitch might be a bit closer to: Hey, we have a ChatGPT, too. And a Google, sort of! (It also contains by far the weirdest specific example of AI use in any of these ads, in which a young man visiting Little Italy with his grandfather asks Meta AI to generate an image of the neighborhood in the ’50s. Elder abuse!)
These are very different ads from very different companies that rather suddenly found themselves competing in the same space. None of these companies seems quite sure about how to repackage an enterprise product — knowledge-work automation — as a consumer good, but they’re certainly trying. That the companies making them, or the ad agencies tasked with making them, aren’t quite sure what they’re saying is the main thing they have in common. One thing they are collectively discovering, though, is what sorts of stories about AI people really don’t want to hear. During the Olympics, Google released, and then quickly pulled, an ad in which a father asks AI to help his daughter write a fan letter to her favorite athlete:
More recently, it was Apple’s turn. In addition to ads about being sort of lazy at work, we’ve gotten one about how AI can fake a thoughtful gift for a forgotten birthday:
And one about how it might help suppress your rage in the office:
And another about how it might help you, a threatening misanthrope, pass for normal with neighbors you despise:
Google’s ad is sentimental, while Apple’s are attempts at humor, and in the grand scheme of AI adoption, neither campaign is likely to matter. But it’s telling that the AI ads that have gotten the most backlash aren’t the ones explicitly about employment or entrepreneurship. Instead, it’s the ones that take the experience of being a person as a sort of job itself — the ones that reveal that, to companies building broad automation technology, everything looks like a job in need of optimization. People are worried about what AI might mean for their work. Maybe they’re just as worried about what it portends for everything else.