That’s us when that commercial came on.
Photo: Getty Images
If you’ve been watching the Olympics, you’ve likely seen a Google ad called “Dear Sydney.” The ad tells the story of a father’s grade-school track and field daughter who wants to write a fan letter to Olympian and 400m hurdles world record holder Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. “She wants to show Sydney some love, and I’m good with words, so this would be a perfect fit,” says the narrator’s father.
What will this made-up guy do? He decides to call his daughter to share this sweet moment with her. The father asks Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence model, to help him write a letter to Sydney telling her how much she inspires him. And make sure to mention that she’s going to break the world record one day. She’ll say, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m sorry.'” What are you sorry about?
What? Why would a “pretty good with words” dad need an AI model to help his daughter write a heartfelt message to her favorite athlete? Aren’t moments like these what being a parent is all about? What is the lesson here? Rather than just forcing kids to believe it’s okay to leave their writing assignments to an AI, it suggests that letting a computer express how you feel is a good idea, which may be a problematic precedent. Given the “sorry, not sorry” joke, it feels like she could do this all by herself. Isn’t the Olympics supposed to celebrate human achievement?
Like a lot of things about AI itself, no one seems to want this. The primetime ad caused quite a stir. “I categorically reject the future that Google is promoting,” wrote Syracuse University media professor Shelley Palmer. “I want to live in a culturally diverse world where billions of people use AI to improve their human skills, not a world where we are exploited by AI pretending to be human.” Brand strategist Michael Miraflor wrote that the ad is very similar to Apple’s widely criticized iPad ad from May. “Both give the same impression that something is very wrong, with a kind of insensitivity to the legitimate concerns and fears of the majority,” he wrote, adding that both were developed in-house.
Advertisers weren’t the only ones upset: Google’s YouTube channel had comments turned off for the ad. It’s easy to imagine that the ad was criticized for its creepy tone and bad idea, but if Google is trying to downplay the dystopian vibe of the ad itself, silencing dissenting voices on a company-owned website might not be the best idea.
