The company suggests using AI to write a child’s fan letter. Why?
Google is running a new commercial during the Olympics. It’s about a cute little girl—she’s a runner, and she loves Team USA’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, a world-record-holding track star who won two Olympic gold medals in 2021. The little girl wants to write her a letter. So Dad fires up an AI chatbot.
“Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone how inspiring she is,” he asks Google’s Gemini. He instructs it to add a line about how his daughter plans to break McLaughlin-Levrone’s world record one day (and to be sure to include the phrase sorry, not sorry.) The ad never shows the final letter in full, just pans over snippets of it. The whole thing is supposed to be endearing, demonstrating to viewers how AI can help forge human connection and facilitate creativity.
But come on: Nothing about this ad makes sense.
Isn’t what makes a letter like this cute the fact that it is written by a child? Shouldn’t a young person get to explore their feelings and then authentically relay them? And what about McLaughlin-Levrone? Will she be able to tell that the letter was written by AI? How would she feel about that? Would she send back her own AI-composed message, thanking the child for taking the time to write to her?
The whole thing is bleak. It takes the feel-good cliché of a child getting to interact with their idol and squishes a multimillion-dollar large language model between them. Google is pitching a world in which even the most personal interactions are mediated by computers. The company may make bold claims about AI’s capabilities to radically advance civilization. But it can’t escape the reality that it’s co-opting the hopeful aesthetics of the Olympics, which are meant to celebrate human accomplishments, in order to promote a digital technology that can be used to undermine human labor.
The reaction so far has not been positive. The author Will Leitch said the ad “takes a little chunk out of my soul every time I see it.” The professor and media personality Shelly Palmer wrote that it makes him “want to scream.” On YouTube, where Google posted the ad four days ago, comments are turned off—a step that the company does not typically take on its videos, and one that suggests concern about a backlash.
When I reached out to Google to ask about that backlash, a spokesperson told me, “We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it. Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA.” The ad, which the spokesperson said features a real father and daughter, “aims to show how the Gemini app can provide a starting point, thought starter, or early draft for someone looking for ideas for their writing.”
Google’s marketing team has a tough job right now. The company has aggressively pivoted to a technology that may be dazzling, but that many people remain skeptical of. AI will revolutionize everything, boosters say, but it’s still unclear exactly how. Wall Street is starting to wonder whether investments in the technology will actually pay off. To the extent that generative AI is present in everyday life, it’s not always on the best terms: The technology has arguably degraded once-reliable search engines, plundered human creativity, and taken jobs.
All of which is to say, the reality is far from the sunshine and jump ropes of the “Dear Sydney” ad. Perhaps that’s not unusual: For years, Big Tech’s marketing has relied on sweet montages of regular people using their tools to skirt the very real problems presented by their products. The likes of Meta, TikTok, and Apple may be able to get away with this framing, because their products do connect people at the end of the day, but generative AI is more about humans talking to a computer instead of one another. (Apple found itself in a similar situation earlier this year with an iPad ad that, accidentally or not, evoked AI’s ability to crush art with a machine; Apple quickly apologized and halted plans to run the commercial on TV.)
Google appears to have misread the moment. The Olympics are supposed to be about humans accomplishing amazing feats in the physical world. While the ad was running this weekend, the American surfer Caroline Marks scored a close-to-perfect 9.43 points out of 10 after dropping into the barrel of a giant wave in Tahiti. The 17-year-old Canadian swimming prodigy Summer McIntosh won her first gold medal for the women’s 400-meter individual medley. And the legendary gymnast Simone Biles continued to defy the laws of physics despite an injury. These athletes are indeed inspiring. We don’t need a chatbot to tell them so.