An ad from Google showing its AI model helping a girl write a letter to her star athlete drew ire from some Olympic watchers over the weekend, with some users questioning the impact of AI on human creativity and the future.
The “Dear Sydney” ad, which was intended to promote the abilities of From Google’s Gemini AI, It features a father passionately describing how the gadget wrote his daughter a letter to American hurdler Sydney Michelle McLaughlin Levrone.
However, some viewers criticized the ad for promoting the idea that parents should convince their children to rely on artificial intelligence instead of learning how to express themselves.
“It’s one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen,” Shelley Palmer, a professor of advanced media at Syracuse University, said in a blog post.
“This is exactly what we don’t want anyone to do with AI at all.”
Palmer claimed the commercial suggested that a poorly worded instruction to an AI tool could express a person’s feelings better than they could themselves.
“This commercial featuring someone with a child using AI to write a fan letter to their hero is just so bad,” author Linda Holmes wrote in a post on BlueSky.
“Who wants an AI-written fan letter?”
Social media posts released on a range of platforms have raised questions about whether the ad is in reference to A dystopian future where human creativity is diminished by artificial intelligence.
Technology advocates have hailed the promised benefits of artificial intelligence, but teachers, musicians, artists and others have accused its creators of training advanced computers to replace them.
Earlier this year, Apple had its own advertising blunder, with a commercial showing musical instruments, paint cans and other creative gear smashed and replaced with an iPad to the tune of a song called “All I Need Is You.”
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
