How Apple Showed Us What AI Would Look Like in This 1987 Ad
In the broadest sense, artificial intelligence refers to machines that can perform intelligent tasks. That includes everything from self-driving cars to IBM Watson’s wins on Jeopardy to chess programs that beat grand masters. But what does AI really look like today? In this ad, Apple showed us what it would look like in the future.
The Terminator
Despite having low pre-release expectations, The Terminator ended up breaking records. It topped the United States box office for two weeks, launching the careers of directors Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie also spawned an incredibly popular franchise that includes several sequels, TV shows, novels and even video games.
A Terminator is an infiltration-based assassin built by Skynet, an artificial intelligence that is fighting a war against humans. Known as the T-800, this cybernetic organism is a cyborg composed of living tissue over a robotic endoskeleton. It is sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor, the future mother of John Connor, leader of the human resistance.
One of the scariest things about a Terminator is its relentless drive to kill. This isn’t helped by its lack of empathy or remorse, but rather the fact that it always seems to be two steps ahead of its target.
This is most noticeable during the first car chase, when the Terminator tries to kill Sarah by running her over with a truck and then shooting her in the shoulder. It also has a habit of changing its grip on Sarah (grabbing her by the hair, pinning her to the seat with one arm or not holding her at all) without reason.
A deleted scene from the film revealed that, before being sent back in time, all Terminators are made with their internal chips set to “read only.” This prevents them from learning and potentially turning on their AI master.
The Lemmings
The ad was directed by Ridley Scott, who later went on to direct Blade Runner and Alien. The film’s bleakly dystopian vision of IBM users shuffling in unison and their submissiveness to an all-powerful Big Brother contrasted the defiance of one lone Mac user, which was intended to stand for the individualism that Apple products were designed to promote.
The problem with this ad is that it takes itself far too seriously. Its attempt to mix authentically harrowing imagery with warped humour just didn’t work and ended up being repellent rather than enthralling. By comparison, Apple’s much-loved 1984 ad – also inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – was an unmissable blend of dark visuals and pulse-racing tension.
Another reason that “Lemmings” failed was that it openly scorned the very audience that it sought to resonate with by likening them to mindless lemmings marching blindly toward oblivion. This didn’t go down well with prospective Mac customers, especially as the Macintosh Office promised in the ad (and that Apple file server which it depended on) wouldn’t actually ship until 1987.
Today’s AI systems are based on the idea of machine learning, which allows computers to learn by observing and analysing large datasets. This enables them to perform complex tasks such as identifying patterns or relationships, without being programmed by humans. This is in contrast to reactive machine intelligence, which excels at performing specific tasks but cannot adapt or evolve beyond their initial programming.
The Out of Reach
The future may be here but it’s not evenly distributed. In a time of rapidly developing AI, media and marketing professionals are challenged to find ways to unlock its potential while also mitigating for risks and ethical blind spots.
A great place to start is to consider whether AI is empowering or exclusionary. In the world of education, for example, AI is being used to grade papers and provide feedback, but it doesn’t replace the role of teachers or the bond between students and instructors (Puntoni et al Citation2021; De Bellis and Johar Citation2020).
When it comes to healthcare, AI is being developed to help diagnose illnesses, understand patient behavior, and even perform surgery. But many of these technologies are based on data that has been gathered from patients in wealthy countries, meaning they are unable to detect diseases or prescribe medications for people living in poverty or who live far from clinics.
Meanwhile, evidence suggests that AI is often agnostic and takes on the biases of its human designers. Interview algorithms filter out applicants based on race, car safety tests are based on male dummies, and gender biases in AI systems are well documented (Eisend Citation2021). As a result, critics like Zuboff and Garvey have called for advertising agencies to make sure their products, practices, and tools take into account the social, economic, and cultural impact of AI.
The 1984 ad
The Apple ad from 1984 is one of the most famous TV commercials of all time. Its ominous blue-grey color scheme, a sea of expressionless drones, and the promise that you will never be slave to a machine all reference George Orwell’s seminal science fiction novel. But the ad also references an interesting contemporary issue: power and authority.
The ad depicts a society run by a totalitarian regime in which the citizens are monitored by “Big Brother.” But instead of watching his subjects from a central control room, the dictator watches his subjects through their television screens. The ad ends with a message: On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.
Director Ridley Scott—brother to Blade Runner and Alien director Tony Scott—called the spot a breakthrough in his career, largely because it was so different from the other Super Bowl ads that aired at the time. Moreover, the ad told a story—something that was almost unheard of in advertising at the time.
But despite its success, the ad wasn’t a big hit for Apple. In fact, the company’s board of directors was so upset with it that they asked Chiat/Day to sell back their Super Bowl ad time. But the ad still aired because Chiat/Day intentionally refused to do so. And that was the right call.
