A crushing lack of humanity

Ametronome ticks as a Cher record spins to life on a turntable. The camera pulls back to reveal these objects arranged neatly on a hydraulic press—along with a trumpet, a piano, a guitar, analog cameras, cans of paint, leather-­bound journals, old computer monitors, and even a stack of foam emojis. As the press plate lowers, the trumpet is crushed, the paint cans burst, and the camera lenses shatter. The emoji often used to convey a sense of stunned embarrassment is caught at the edge of the press, wide eyes bulging as its pink cheeks are squashed into oblivion, pulverized with all those older tools of expression in a final blast of dust and detritus. When the press opens, we see the debris has disappeared—or rather, it’s been compressed and packaged neatly as the thinnest, lightest, most powerful iPad yet. A disembodied hand offers it to the viewer as Cher sings, “All I ever need is you.”

Apple no doubt intended this ad, called “Crush,” as a vision of vast creative possibility in a lightweight, portable package. Viewers, however, experienced it as a dystopian nightmare tapping into their worst fears about tech. Watching a machine grind the tools of human creativity into dust made some people viscerally ill. In response, Apple pulled the ad and apologized.

Elsewhere, Catholic Answers—a popular apologetics website and owner of the domain catholic.com—debuted an AI bot named Father Justin. A 3-D avatar in a Roman collar, Father Justin was trained on vast stores of Catholic doctrine to address common questions such as the difference between mortal and venial sin. But soon he claimed he’d been ordained by a human bishop and could witness the sacrament of marriage and grant absolution through the sacrament of reconciliation. Like ChatGPT helping our columnist Melissa Florer-Bixler write a sermon, Father Justin’s answers seemed to come “from everywhere and nowhere” (see “A pulpit without a context”).