If you’ve been watching the Olympics, you have inevitably been exposed to an advertisement from Google called Dear Sydney. The premise involves a father talking about his daughter, a grade-school track-and-field athlete who would like to write a fan letter to Olympian and 400-meter-hurdle world -recorder holder Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. “She wants to show Sydney some love, and I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right,” says the narrator dad.
What is this made-up man to do? To share this sweet moment with his daughter, he decides to phone it in. The dad tells Gemini, Google’s artificial-intelligence model, to “help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is and be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day. She says, ‘Sorry, not sorry.’” Sorry, what?
What? Why would a dad who is “pretty good with words” need an AI model to help his daughter write a heartfelt message to her favorite athlete? Aren’t these moments what parenthood is all about? What sort of lesson is this? Not only does it imply to your kid that it’s okay to offload writing assignments to AI, it also suggests it’s a good idea to let the computer express feelings for you, which may be a troubling precedent. Given the “Sorry, not sorry” joke, it also feels like she’s quite capable of doing all this herself. Isn’t the whole premise of the Olympics to celebrate human achievement?
Like many things about AI itself, this is something seemingly nobody wants. People were quite upset with the ad, which kept playing during prime time. “I flatly reject the future that Google is advertising,” wrote Syracuse media professor Shelly Palmer. “I want to live in a culturally diverse world where billions of individuals use AI to amplify their human skills, not in a world where we are used by AI pretending to be human.” Brand strategist Michael Miraflor wrote that the ad was quite similar to the Apple iPad commercial from May that was widely reviled. “They both give the same feeling that something is very off, a sort of tone-deafness to the valid concerns and fears of the majority,” he wrote, adding that both were developed in-house.
It wasn’t just the ad heads who were pissed. On Google’s YouTube channel, comments for the ad were turned off. It’s easy to imagine it was getting cooked for its uncanny tone and bad ideas. But if Google is trying to downplay the dystopian energy in the ad itself, maybe it isn’t best to silence dissent on a website that it owns.
