There is literally exactly that ad.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BK8bnkcT0Ng
Imho, it's one of the best "Why AI?" ads I've seen so far.
https://youtu.be/kOO31qFmi9A?si=Ww9i4FCxxpMj3YIs
The guy in the Excel commercial comes off as cool, confident, and skilled at using Excel. Both ads show off the speed of the tool in high stakes scenarios, but the Apple one makes the user look like an idiot. Also the Apple ad shows everyone with macs, so he has no advantage over everyone else.
- In 2019, Apple released a three-minute ad online. The ad was called The Underdogs
- In 2020, The Underdogs moved locations. […] The ad was seven minutes
- On 11 March 2022, Apple released the third installment of the series. […] This ad spot is a staggering nine minutes long
Looking at https://youtube.com/watch?v=JJwdhWM9d0Y, there’s a fourth episode of about 5 minutes, taking total length to 26 minutes.
I also remember there being an older televised Apple ad of over 20 minutes, but cannot find it.
FWIW, everyone else in that video comes off as a bunch of idiots, so I'm not sure it's that much better.
This is very different from someone who was given a report he/she could not possibly have read in time!
This guy is the person who uses Sparknotes instead of doing his homework. I'm all for efficiency, but if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report, they'd just have written the summary.
Of course, maybe in this brave new world we're living in, the report's author did just write a summary, then used AI to turn it into a multi-page document, which readers used AI to turn back into a summary.
Is this what we want?
Where'd you get that from? That everyone else had read it / lied about reading it?
In other words: beware of fundamental attribution error.
Instead, he lied. And while I don't think that's some unforgivable crime—there are absolutely circumstances that could justify it—I don't think that's what the ad is portraying. You have to go out and come up with additional external factors which the ad does not provide evidence for.
The guy was clearly zoned out and caught off guard. And yeah, maybe that's because he was taking care of a crying newborn all night and is sleep deprived, but that's not the simplest explanation or the one Apple intended for us to think about.
That is not my experience with corporate writing in the slightest.
Easier said than done, I get it. But I'm scared of AI normalizing this. What happens when no one, even the good writers, can write for actual people any more, because everything is uniformly thrown into an AI?
But everyone will know everyone can do this. So it will stop impressing anyone, maybe.
I'm curious if you work in a corporate environment. Middle management gets swamped with stuff like this because the person who wrote the reports thinks the longer the better to show off how good they are at their job.
Amazon fought this trend with their commonly referred 1-pager and >=6-pagers.
I don't have hard rules like Amazon, but one of my common pushbacks on my team is make documents shorter.
I think these LLMs are tremendously useful and the ads undersell them. But I can also appreciate that the ads have to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and showing real workflows in 30sec is difficult.
Reviewing emails, summarizing meetings, documents, key points, TPS reports.
Are these all seriously that impactful? If your job can be condensed into information summarising, then your job can and will be done by the same machine that is doing the summarising for you.
Any and all "edge" a human might have in that business (unique insight and perspectives, noticing details that sound okay but actually aren't, human pattern recognition) get lost in the human-AI-AI-human translation. In this commercial, if prospectus was written by AI and is now summarized by AI, what is the point of the people around the table? The ad's should be used to show it's impact to scale the edge instead of scaling generic business bullshit.
If your company is a swarm of people using AI to generate all input/output, your company might scale wider but it will (mostly) be doing mediocre work - unless your hires are explicitly good at using AI. If it's mediocre and scaled wide, others can easily create the same output and beat you with pricing.
tl;dr; scale the edge, not the middle.