I think Apple and many other tech companies are still trying to brand themselves as mavericks who are upending a stuffy establishment, a mythology which is exemplified well by ads like this. I think the gaucheness of it was very intentional, and exactly the kind of provocative boasting that appealed to a certain kind of young, counterculturally-inclined creative people when Apple was first running ads on TV
I think when you're a trillion dollar company, one of the major players in an industry that has very much become The Establishment, and are speaking to artists for whom technology companies - and Apple in particular - have been constantly "innovating" in ways to decrease their share of the fruits of their labor for the last twenty years, and the last 3 or so have been a constant news blitz of smug techbros claiming all creatives should accept whatever scraps they can get because they're about to be replaced by ML models that are from their perspective sophisticated stochastic plagiarism bots that seem to frame the entire premise of releasing your work online as the setup for a long con... Yea, maybe it's gonna read as a bit tonedeaf
I think when you're a trillion dollar company, one of the major players in an industry that has very much become The Establishment, and are speaking to artists for whom technology companies - and Apple in particular - have been constantly "innovating" in ways to decrease their share of the fruits of their labor for the last twenty years, and the last 3 or so have been a constant news blitz of smug techbros claiming all creatives should accept whatever scraps they can get because they're about to be replaced by ML models that are from their perspective sophisticated stochastic plagiarism bots that seem to frame the entire premise of releasing your work online as the setup for a long con... Yea, maybe it's gonna read as a bit tonedeaf