If you haven’t seen this ad, you are leading a blessed existence and I wish to trade places with you. But I am about to recount it to you so that you can share in my misery, as anyone who has been watching the Olympics in any format now does.
The ad features a little girl who wants to write a letter to her idol, Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. So far, so good! The little girl’s dad wants to help her.
“I’m pretty good with words,” the girl’s dad says, “but this has to be just right.” So … they will write it together? So … he will let his daughter write it herself? No! So … he asks Gemini AI to write the letter to Sydney on his daughter’s behalf — and be sure to tell Sydney “sorry, not sorry” that his daughter plans to break her records one day.
And the AI gamely does! (From the two or three lines of its output that you can glimpse in the course of the ad, you can see that the letter it writes is, candidly, garbage.)
Amazingly, this is an ad for the Gemini AI. Not an ad made by Google’s detractors in the hopes of getting us all to rise up with pitchforks and shut the whole thing down. Personally, I am not a big corporation, but I do not think that a good way of selling your product is to announce that it will suck all the joy out of being alive. I enjoy the joys of being alive. I don’t hate efficiency. But I hate missing the point.
All of the buffoons excited by the prospect of AI taking over all our writing — report summaries, data surveys, children’s letters, all tossed into the same pile indiscriminately — are missing the point in a spectacular manner. Do you know what writing is?
It is thinking in a form that you can share with other people. It is a method for taking thoughts and images and stories out of your brain and putting them into someone else’s brain. E.M. Forster quotes a woman saying, “How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?” To take away the ability to write for yourself is to take away the ability to think for yourself.
If the little girl in the commercial knows that she wants to say sorry-not-sorry for breaking Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone’s records someday, she already has more to say than Gemini ever will. What about Sydney inspires you? Why do you want to write to her? How do you want to be? Gemini doesn’t know any of these things.
This is an ad for the people who think that replacing meals with pills is a prospect that fills everyone with delight, that if we can ever do away with sleep and music entirely, it will be a grand triumph. Instead of wastefully spending hours picking out yarn and knitting your baby a blanket by hand, Grandma can now push a button!
This is an ad for people who think, “Who would POSSIBLY want a horrible letter from a CHILD? Why, there might be MISSPELLINGS in it! The attached drawing might have a head that was TOO LARGE and hands with six fingers!” Compare this to the marvel of a letter written by AI, which might include a drawing with six fingers but for different reasons.
What will these buffoons come up with next? “Gemini, propose for me”? “Gemini, tell my parents I love them”? Lying on your death bed, “Gemini, write a letter to my children saying all the things I wish I’d been able to tell them”? “What was my favorite thing about being alive?”
You’re missing it! You’re missing all of it! Go home, jump back into the sea, forget it, because this is the ride and you’re missing it.