The ads are everywhere; on bus shelters and in big-money live-sportscasts and Web interstitials. They say Apple’s products are great because Apple Intelligence and Google’s too because Google Gemini. I think what’s going on here is pretty obvious and a little sad. AI and GG are LLMM: Large Language Mobile Marketing!

It looks like this:

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Here are nice factual Wikipedia rundowns on Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini.

The object of the game is to sell devices, and the premise seems to be that people will want to buy them because they’re excited about what AI and GG will do for them. When they arrive, that is, which I guess they’re just now starting to. I guess I’m a little more LLM-skeptical than your average geek, but I read the list of features and thought: Would this sort of thing accelerate my mobile-device-upgrade latency, which at the moment is around three years? Um, no. Anyone’s? Still dubious.

Quite possibly I’m wrong. Maybe there’ll be a wave of influencers raving about how AI/GG improved their sex lives, income, and Buddha-nature, the masses will say “gotta get me some of that” and quarterly sales will soar past everyone’s stretch goals.

What I think happened · I think that the LLMania among the investor/executive class led to a situation where massive engineering muscle was thrown at anything with genAI in its pitch, and when it came time to ship, demanded that that be the white-hot center of the launch marketing.

Because just at the moment, a whole lot of nontechnical people with decision-making power have decided that it’s lethally risky not to bet the farm on a technology they don’t understand. It’s not like it’s the first time it’s happened.

Why it’s sad · First, because the time has long gone when a new mobile-device feature changed everyone’s life. Everything about them is incrementally better every year. When yours wears out, there’ll be a bit of new-shiny feel about onboarding to your new one. But seriously, what proportion of people buy a new phone for any reason other than “the old one wore out”?

This is sad personally for me because I was privileged to be there, an infinitesimally small contributor during the first years of the mobile wave, when many new features felt miraculous. It was a fine time but it’s gone.

The other reason it’s sad is the remorseless logic of financialized capitalism; the revenue number must go up even when the audience isn’t, and major low-hanging unmet needs are increasingly hard to find.

So, the machine creates a new unmet need (for AI/GG) and plasters it on bus shelters and my TV screen. I wish they wouldn’t.