The recent Apple iPad Pro advertisement has sparked intense reactions and criticism online, with it being interpreted as the technologists celebrating with glee, the crushing of individual human creative endeavours into a machine, that squished the creative spirit out as a sludge by product, leaving behind, only a cold sterile calculating machine.
It came across as the Matrix with a Mc Happy Face, would you like fries with that? Or, you will create nothing and be happy. The following image expresses the sentiment exactly.
I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
Wait! Hang on, weren't the globalist utopian technocrats promising a future of leisure and creativity, because AI will take over the drudgery of work, because we'll all be on Universal Basic Income?
The Apple advertisement is convergent with a rising tide of frustration that many creatives have been facing, seeing their works consumed as data sets to train Large Language Models, otherwise sold to the public as, "Artificial Intelligence".
As all of the major tech companies rush to capitalise on the AI gold rush, regardless of what copyright laws they have broken, it seemed to be that Apple were rubbing people's noses in the proverbial, mocking them, and gloating over their theft and enslavement of human creative output to their profit.
The sheer wanton destruction of many items that represent people's enjoyment of the creative process, the Apple ad, is what left people in shock, disbelief and finally anger.
Apple has apologized for the ad, acknowledging that it "missed the mark" and stating that its goal is to celebrate the diverse ways users express themselves through the iPad. However the horse has already bolted. Since creatives form a large part of Apple's target customer base, who are already suffering under the AI robber barons, the advertisement hit a very raw nerve, and showed, that even their cherished tech cult priests in reality cared not a jot for real human creativity.
People are increasingly seeing through the hollowness of the "forever" tech advances of the latest shiny product or software version. The end goal is to consume, and for humanity to offer up it's creative soul on the altar of tech. The large press in the Apple advert even has the look of an altar soaked in blood. The very thing people are craving, tactile creative experiences is slaughtered, for what, another product that you don't even truly own, because you don't even have the right repair.
The pain of technological "advancement" at all costs, is already being felt by multitudes of people who are losing jobs, or seeing the businesses dry up because of AI.
Microsoft have taken things a whole new level where their latest operating system, Windows 11, being literal spyware. The operating system will take screenshots without your consent. The new Windows 11 "feature", Recall is described as a "photographic memory" for your PC, making local Windows searches much faster by constantly taking screenshots of everything you do. It takes Orwellian surveillance to another level.
Microsoft's assurance that is not spyware and that the screenshots would stay locally on their PCs, has been met with scorn, as Windows is the operating system that is most often backdoored by malware and three letter government agencies.
You might recall a meme from a few years back, "Facebook, you are the product", which encapsulates the sociopathic attitudes Big Tech has towards, what was once their customers, to now their product.
It seems increasingly that the attitude of Big Tech, is that people and their data are serfs in a technological feudalism, where the tech lords wage war over ownership rights of the peasants, toiling in the fields producing more data, the new digital gold.
But it seems people are growing weary of this, and starting to opt out. There is a current boom in dumb phones. If you're old enough to remember, the old style Nokias we used when the mobile phone craze took off.
While this trend does include a reluctance to produce meta data for the tech overlords, it seems to stem more from the desire to be free of the digital chains, attention devouring apps and devices. Some people are starting to wake up and realise, they have digital addictions, and the tech giants are the dealers and pushers.
There is a spark of the human soul in some that yearns to be free, yearning for a time when we were masters of our own human relationships.