Hugh Grant Slams Controversial Apple Crushing iPad Ad, Calls It “Destruction Of The Human Experience”

Actor Hugh Grant ripped into tech giant Apple over their latest iPad Ad, which showed a myriad of creative tools being crushed with an industrial-sized hydraulic press. The ad for the new iPad Pro triggered an uproar on social media on Wednesday, May 8, after many perceived it as a subliminal message of technology replacing human creativity.

The minute-long Ad called Crush, which dropped on Tuesday, May 7, showed a heavy-duty machine pulverizing all creative materials, including musical instruments, sculpture and an analogue camera, as the soundtrack of the Sonny and Cher 1971 tune “All I Ever Need Is You” plays in the background.

The Apple commercial sparked outrage online as many opined it implied generative AI can easily replace human creativity. Several social media users took offense to the ad, rendering the creative tools superfluous in the age of technology. Among the people who slammed the new commercial was actor Hugh Grant, who wrote on X, “The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley.”