In my favorite Meta A.I. ad, a woman tells her boyfriend that she’s excited to have him meet her parents — before impishly mentioning that her father is a thermodynamicist at NASA. The befuddled boyfriend rushes home, phone in hand. “Hey Meta,” he asks. “What the heck is a thermodynamicist?”
Over the next 24 hours, our protagonist talks to Meta’s chatbot obsessively. He talks to Meta as he settles into the back seat of a rideshare. He talks to Meta while walking with his morning coffee, swaddled in an oversize hoodie. He talks to Meta while shaving for work. And when the night of the dinner finally arrives, he stands in front of the father and, looking stricken, reels off a line about how excited he is to discuss “the transition from liquid fuel to hybrid propellants.”
The vision of life here is bizarre. Why is our protagonist rushing everywhere, like a perpetually late college student? Why doesn’t he ask his girlfriend what a thermodynamicist is? (She should know: That’s what her dad does.) Better yet, why can’t he just have a conversation with the father about it, like a normal person with a capacity for being curious about someone else’s life?
This commercial’s “Looney Tunes” vibe is not a bug: This is how Silicon Valley has tried to sell artificial intelligence to consumers, at least on television. In commercial after commercial, humans are oblivious, enfeebled, barely functioning idiots beset by more tasks, stimuli and demands on their time than anyone could reasonably handle. In another ad, a man finds that his cat has eaten his daughter’s pet goldfish, Frank. He wants to buy another but can’t remember where he got the first one. Enter Meta. The chatbot alerts him that the store is closing, so the man scampers to his car — but when he reaches the store, he can’t remember what Frank even looked like. Again, he petitions Meta for help. I suppose Meta is meant to be saving the child, and therefore the father, from unhappiness, but what it actually seems to be doing is sparing them any feelings that might lend meaning to their lives.
The most galling ad features a woman who is hosting a “Moby Dick” book club. It’s unclear whether she has actually read any of the book. What is clear is that she doesn’t have the time or desire to think about it. No worry: Meta gives her a Melville-for-Dummies gloss on what the white whale represents (the vastness of life and meaninglessness of existence), and even suggests some conversation starters.
The people in these commercials are motivated by laziness and incuriosity, even when it comes to the most intimate of concerns. In a commercial for Google’s Gemini, a father explains that his daughter’s dream is to be just like the Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. He wants to help his daughter send her a letter. “I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right,” the man says. “So Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is.” The unintentionally hilarious subtext here is that McLaughlin-Levrone would receive a letter from a young fan, find the prose lacking and throw it in the trash; the less funny assumption is that someone could be more moved by an A.I. letter than by the unpolished emotion of an enthusiastic child.
If, for some reason, your brain stops functioning, Meta’s got you.
Part of what makes these commercials so amusing is that we are watching Silicon Valley struggle to imagine how normal humans might use this technology, and then reverse-engineer the problems those uses might solve. Can’t remember the name of a store that you’ve been to several times, or what your daughter’s goldfish looked like? If, for some reason, your brain stops functioning, Meta’s got you.
On another level, though, these ads are also trying to sell a vision in which humans have finally, fully offloaded their capacities for thinking and social interaction. Such visions aren’t new. Movie dystopias like the futuristic Los Angeles of “Her” and “Blade Runner 2049” presented A.I. entities as a refuge of the lonely. Ryan Gosling’s android assassin in “2049,” named K, is forlorn, bereft of family and friends, and made even more alienated by the fact that he is a “replicant” tasked with eliminating his own kind. He is a radically deracinated individual with only one companion: Joi, a holograph A.I. with whom he simulates an intimacy otherwise denied him. The two converse, eat dinner and read Nabokov, imitating exactly the kind of interaction today’s A.I. ads promise to spare us from. She is the ultimate girlfriend experience, a nonjudgmental partner whose only need is to satisfy his needs.
Meta’s and Google’s commercials tacitly acknowledge that our lives with A.I. will be as lonely as K’s; their strangest quality is how they almost completely excise ordinary social interactions. One Gemini ad portrays two people sitting side by side; one stares at the first slide of a presentation about atomic bonds while the other plays video games. When the student finds himself confused, he doesn’t ask his friend whether he knows the difference between ionic and covalent bonds (nor does he, say, read the next slide). He turns to Gemini and types, “Help me understand the difference between these chemical bonds.” The befuddled boyfriend in the ad with the thermodynamicist gets a ride home from a driver whom he does not talk to (he’s too busy talking to Meta) and whom we do not see. He walks down a crowded street but acknowledges no one, while Meta speaks to him through A.I.-enabled Ray-Bans. When he finally does speak to another human, it’s not because he actually wants to learn about the man’s life or work; it’s because he wants to demonstrate mastery, to leap a hurdle.
The commercial ends on a joke: The thermodynamicist father looks confused. “What?” he asks. “I sell insurance.” The boyfriend’s face goes blank with terror before the father says he’s just kidding. This is funny, though probably not for the reason its writers intended. Meta has created a vision of life in which, without A.I. aiding his every word, an individual can be left reeling by the simplest of human interactions, unmanned by an ordinary dad joke. Why would we want to be like this — so easily unnerved, so harried, so lonely?
To be fair, that isolation is the one thing these commercials are not making up. Tech has created a loneliness epidemic that it now wants to help us solve. In an interview with the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, suggested that A.I. might one day be able to replace people’s friends. “There’s this stat that I always think is crazy,” he said, as if he himself had not had a hand in its creation. “The average American, I think, has — I think it’s fewer than three friends. Three people that they’d consider friends. And the average person has a demand for meaningfully more — I think it’s, like, 15 friends.” The market language here — demand standing in for desire — suggests that tech moguls are prepared to turn a social and political crisis into a market opportunity. The commercials themselves suggest that even stranger crises are on the horizon.
These crises are exactly what the ads don’t want us thinking about. After all, when we do see A.I. producing truly mind-blowing results — mimicking voices, creating fake videos capable of fooling the credulous, identifying faces in a crowd — we’re often justifiably unsettled. What does all this mean for the future of our jobs, our privacy, our social cohesion? A.I.’s transformative potential seems to be strongest in all the applications that good students of science fiction would recognize as the most dangerous for human flourishing. No matter how charming the companies try to make their A.I.-enhanced near futures, they can’t help betraying the bleakness of their worldview. But why worry about that when Meta can help you make a vegan version of your favorite recipe?
Ismail Muhammad is a story editor at the magazine.
Source photographs for illustration above: Digital Vision Vectors, via Getty Images; Screenshots from Meta.
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