Worried about turning over your data and outsourcing your thinking to the world’s biggest companies?
Stop fretting — AI will just be a cheerful pal that will prepare you for job interviews, tell you fun factoids, take your creativity to new heights and reduce the awkwardness of family gatherings, all while getting you a little closer to your humanity.
So went the message — sometimes subtextual, sometimes explicit — as tech companies made one of their biggest pushes ever during the Super Bowl on Sunday.
Google led the charge with its AI-fueled ads for Gemini, Pixel and Workspace products, particularly trying to yank the heartstrings with a spot about a job interviewee recalling how raising his daughter honed the muscles for whatever nebulous corporate job he sought. Never mind that the AI didn’t really do much for the main character that your 12-year-old cousin couldn’t (“try rephrasing your answer to sound more confident,” was about the sum of it). You felt good watching it. And AI is all about making you feel good.
The ads came in a long tradition of what might be called the Super Bowl’s tech-normalization movement, in which frontiers foreign or fraught are made safe by companies introducing them to us at our most guard-down moment: while we snack on chips hanging with friends. From using a Mac in 1984 to shopping online in 2000 to investing in crypto in 2022, our screens on this day are filled with what Silicon Valley wants us to embrace next.
In 2025 that something is AI, and the message came in emotional packaging that emphasized the utility while downplaying the hazards. It was, to be generous, a mixed bag.
Google quickly fell into hot water with a regional ad buy that might be called Gouda-Gate. The company first included in an online drop and then edited out for the game itself a fact a Wisconsin cheesemaker solicited from Gemini about gouda accounting for at least 50 percent of all cheese consumption. The real number is, of course, much lower, prompting the change.
The mess somehow became worse when Google’s president of cloud applications, Jerry Dischler, dug in and said the fact “was not a hallucination,” writing that “Gemini is grounded in the Web — and users can always check the results and references. In this case, multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat.” Which would be a little like the restaurant saying, yes its food has E. coli, but don’t worry, its suppliers had assured them that it didn’t.
A self-own was embedded within the ad too; Google seemed to boast that its ideal customers are people unable to write or think for themselves.
At least you could understand the small-business use case with that spot. A Gemini ad in which a nervous boyfriend asked AI for football terms before arriving at his girlfriend’s family Super Bowl party made him sound like such a poseur even a child wondered what the hell he was doing.
The ad was an even more striking examples of a self-own — where a human-centered search might have required some critical thought and genuine understanding of the game, AI-fed answers just make us all sound like hollow parrots. The spot also backfired by turning its idealized customer into a yahoo — “How many innings are in a football game?” — a question totally normal people walk around asking.
Don’t be fooled by the casual execution, though. The spots represent a particular urgency for Google, which badly needs Gemini and these talkable assistants to take hold. Traditional search has become something younger people don’t like and digital advertisers like less, putting the $300 billion business up for grabs. Gemini is its solution.
Meanwhile, OpenAI, buying its first Super Bowl spot, picked up a bigger anvil, putting AI in the context of the entirety of human history. In a series of graphics that owed just a little too much to a 1980s Print Shop aesthetic, the 60-second commercial went from fire and the wheel to space exploration…but then it too looped back to the everyday-helper use cases of asking for a raise or identifying birds. The spot seemed caught between the poles of the epic and prosaic. But more problematic was what happened off-screen.
OpenAI and agency Accenture Song actually used the former’s video tool Sora to create the ad in the first place — presumably making the spot’s own case — but only in the early stages, bringing in human designers to fully develop it later. Clearly the handoff was meant to show the company’s recognition of the value of flesh-and-blood creativity. But like the Gemini football ad, it also caught the firm in its own contradiction — a commercial arguing for what the machines could do inadvertently showed how much the humans can do better.
By casting OpenAI in terms of its help factor — “what do you want to create next,” the closing voice-over asked — the ad at least furthered chief executive Sam Altman’s bid to bring this form of intelligence into our daily work lives. (“We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies,” he wrote last month, even as many AI experts are less sure.)
And Meta offered a slightly more achievable example of how this new tech might work, with spots for its Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses bringing in two Chrisses (Pratt and Hemsworth) and later Kris Jenner to show how the smart-shades could be used as one gazes upon art in a museum — AI as portable city guide. But the leap there is more quantitative than qualitative — a jump in form function more than anything new the glasses are actually giving you — and also conveniently ignores the privacy concerns that come when an everyday accessory in a potentially always-on recording device.
The Super Bowl tech genre has become so established it has even provoked a counter-movement. Three years ago, at the height of Metaverse-mania, Matthew McConaughey came in and pimped for more humanist concerns in a Salesforce ad. “While the others look to the Metaverse and Mars, let’s stay here and restore ours,” he memorably said.
In a sign of how complete the AI takeover has become, McConaughey and Salesforce were back this year — but arguing for the transformative power of the tech via the company’s Agentforce suite.
“What AI is meant to be,” a pair of spots (pairing McConaughey with his old True Detective co-star Woody Harrelson) touted, while suggesting AI would have helped him get a better table and food order. A head-scratching use case, to say the least.
As a YouTube commenter said, “This commercial makes zero logical sense, and it angers me. You also can look at the weather. The dining staff aren’t going to put someone outside in the rain. When ordering, YOU tell them what YOU want, not them guessing. Did you get chatGPT to write this garbage?”
An AI re-creation of the professional high points of Jimmy Johnson during the pre-game — complete with generative video of the football mainstay walking on a field as a younger man — underscored how gaining acceptance for the technology will be much harder than just campaigning for it. The segment produced polarized reactions on social media. And while some appreciated the liberties, the backlash showed that audiences aren’t necessarily ready for something other than traditional film, appealingly easy (and cheap) though it might be for networks.
So where will all this lead? Historically, the spots have brought checkered results. The 1984 ad (directed by Ridley Scott) seriously offered Apple as an alternative to IBM and paved the way to a personal-tech global-leadership spot it continues to hold today. The online-shopping bid led to most of those companies going belly-up (remember Pets.com? Me neither) not long after, though the 300 million people who use Amazon owe a little debt to the mindset-shift that began that day.
And the crypto ad from Larry David was one of the best-received of 2022 (“it’s too far!”) but it was for FTX, and by the next Super Bowl Sam Bankman-Fried had been arrested.
When it comes to AI there’s no doubt the tech will be part of our lives, but at what human cost and with what social backlash remains to be seen. The jury is still very much out on how this 2025 class of ads will age. Don’t be surprised if next year brings more on-air pleas to restore what’s ours. Matthew McConaughey, please stand by.