Google's Gemini AI Ad Sparks Controversy Over Historical Accuracy and AI Ethics

Google's Olympics-themed AI ad gives some viewers the ick

Google's latest Olympics-themed ad for its generative artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, Gemini, is drawing some backlash. In the "Dear Sydney" ad, Gemini generates a letter for a dad helping his daughter write to Olympic gold medal hurdler, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The father prompts Gemini 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.)" Those who didn't appreciate the ad noted how cold an actual AI-generated fan letter would be. Linda Holmes, the host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, wrote on Bluesky: "This commercial showing somebody having a child use AI to write a fan letter to her hero SUCKS. Obviously there are special circumstances and people who need help, but as a general 'look how cool, she didn't even have to write anything herself!' story, it SUCKS. Who wants an AI-written fan letter??" Holmes went on to say that fan letters are "a great way for a kid to learn to write," and encouraging children to use AI for writing would prevent them from learning how to improve their writing skills. "Sit down with your kid and write the letter with them!," Holmes wrote. "I'm just so grossed out by the entire thing." Meanwhile, members of the Daddit subreddit on Reddit seemed to share the sentiment, with some calling the ad "disgusting" and "tone deaf" for taking creativity and personality out of communication, and for depicting a parent too lazy to teach their child how to write. Google posted the Gemini ad to YouTube with the comments section turned off. On X, formerly Twitter, one viewer described the ad as "heartless," while another said parents using AI this way would be "doing their child a gross disservice." Even though the ad shows Gemini responding with "a draft" to get the letter-writing process started, TechCrunch's Anthony Ha pointed out that if all of McLaughlin-Levrone's fans used Gemini as a starting point, "Sydney would just end up with a giant stack of nearly identical letters." Still, it's not as if big-time celebrities are known for actually reading and replying to fan mail personally; some celebrities simply outsource the job. Google ad communications manager Alana Beale told Axios that the company believes "that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it."

Google's new Gemini ad showcases Big Tech's big AI misunderstanding - Fast Company

Remember when you were a kid, and you had that one celebrity hero who could do no wrong? Maybe you loved them so much that you wrote them heartfelt fan mail, laboring over every word to express how much you looked up to them. Now, what if AI could have done all of that tricky emotional work for you? For many viewers, that seems to be the unfortunate proposition of Google's new Team USA ad, which is currently airing alongside the 2024 Paris Olympics. The spot, called "Dear Sydney," features a dad as he watches his daughter grow up and fall in love with running. Along the way, she discovers American hurdler and Olympic gold medalist Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, who becomes her athletic role model. The father then prompts Google Gemini to write the Olympian a note on his daughter's behalf. The result is an ad that affects sincerity while seemingly suggesting that a child's creativity should be replaced with words from an AI program. In a landscape rife with AI doomsday narratives, that story arc reads as tone-deaf -- and it won't do Google any favors. Google's Gemini AI chatbot initially appears when the ad demonstrates how its AI Overview feature might help to quickly answer a sports-related search like, "how to teach hurdle technique." That's all well and good. The real problems begin around midway through the video, when the narrator decides to ask Gemini AI to write his daughter's fan mail to McLaughlin-Levrone.

A neuroscientist explains what was wrong with the Google Gemini Olympics ad

Writing your hero means knowing what's in your heart, which is a mystery to Google's Gemini. Credit: Google Artificial intelligence can do remarkable things, but a general consensus seems to have emerged about one thing it can't, or perhaps shouldn't, do: Compose a child's admiring letter to her sports hero. Google learned this lesson the hard way. "Dear Sidney," the company's new ad for its AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, in which a dad asks Gemini to write a note to Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone on his daughter's behalf, has been widely criticized. People have wanted to "scream." They are "grossed out." They've described the ad as "disgusting." Dr. James R. Doty, a Stanford University neuroscientist who studies how people set intentions and achieve their goals, felt less outrage and more concern for the commercial's troubling premise. "This is a very personal narrative that comes, if you will, from [a person's] heart and soul," Doty told Mashable. "Somehow switching it to have an AI do it for you...it destroys the whole understanding of what it is to write a letter to a hero." Doty, author of the new book Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, said that using generative AI to compose such a message isn't just a missed opportunity for authentic human expression. In addition, the author is skipping a crucial part of their own intention- and goal-setting process, given that our heroes often prompt us to consider the kind of life we want for ourselves. Doty said that effective goal-setting should begin with deep reflection about your values, connecting those to the goal you want to achieve, understanding how that aim can be of service to others, and then setting intentions that, along with hard work, help you ultimately manifest the aspiration. So for the young girl in Google's ad -- or any child who sees a reflection of their own ambition and dedication to a sport -- taking the time to contemplate and articulate why they adore their hero, and want to break their record, can be a pivotal part of goal-setting. Of course, doing this with a parent, like the dad in the commercial, would create a unique bonding moment, too. Doty noted that an AI chatbot given this writing task might just gather the information it thinks is relevant, such as the hero's records, awards, and accolades. That résumé roundup might reduce time spent on research for the letter writer. But Doty argued that the results could also omit achievements that aren't so quantifiable -- such as an athlete's positive contributions to their own community or their sexual or gender identity -- which help make them a hero in so many people's eyes. Sure, a child might hope to be their sport's next GOAT, but the prospect of becoming an athlete role model to children could be just as important to them. "For it to resonate authentically, it has to be your narrative, not AI's narrative, which it has created out of a million pieces of information about that athlete," Doty said. He added that many AI products, particularly those that cater to social media content, are pitched to users as tools to help them get more likes or engagement. While Gemini is marketed as a chatbot that helps users "supercharge" their ideas, it might still aim to create likable content, which could steer an author of any age away from heartfelt reflection, or undermine confidence in their own vision and voice. Importantly, Doty said that goal-setting works best when you're dreaming big in a calm, relaxed state, and able to imagine future achievements in a state of mind driven by love, not fear. In other words, it's much harder to accomplish goals formed by a desire for external validation or material goods because of the attendant anxiety and disappointment. But AI wouldn't necessarily know that. Despite his criticism, Doty is no opponent of generative AI; he co-founded a mental health app that uses the technology, and he believes it can support human creativity and expression without substituting for it. "If it writes something that's not you, or how you deeply feel, then it's not you, and it's a lie," Doty said.

Google's Latest Pitch for AI Is So Sad It Sounds Like a Spoof

If you've been watching the Olympics, you might have seen Google's new ad pitching its generative AI-powered chatbot, Gemini. And if you have seen it, we're curious: did you roll your eyes to the back of your skull when you first saw it, too? The commercial in question features a young girl who aspires to be like Team USA hurdling star and two-time Olympic gold medal winner Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The girl's father, who narrates the ad, wants to help his daughter write a fan letter to her favorite athlete, so he turns to Gemini to help him do it. "Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is," the father prompts the bot, "and be sure to mention how my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day. (She says sorry, not sorry.)" Gemini then spits out the requested letter -- which in the small portion that's visible looks perfectly generic. But while we would hope that this father-daughter duo might then spruce up the AI-spun fan mail with some more personality, the intended message of the commercial -- that generative AI is there to offer a helping hand to all, including tykes hoping to reach out to their favorite athlete -- falls wildly, brutally flat. After all, this kid isn't an executive trying to expedite penning a boring, bound-to-be-formulaic email. She's a child who, instead of learning how to express herself through words on paper, is instead being taught to turn to a computer program that automatically provides a soulless and formulaic facsimile of genuine expression to learn from. Depressing stuff. To be clear, we're not saying that the fictional kid in the commercial shouldn't be able to get some actual help while writing her letter. Assistance is important, and it's part of how kids learn! They give it -- a fan letter, a math problem, a new move on the field -- their best shot, and a good teacher or parent or coach helps them by editing, adjusting, and providing some healthy guidance along the way. The kid hopefully takes the notes and learns, and in doing so, they get better. Conversely, a great way to not help kids get better at written communication (or anything, really) is to simply get someone or something else to do the work for them. This isn't about trying to train a kid to be a professional writer one day. This is about foundational knowledge and skills. Just because a young person might not feel naturally inclined to a subject -- hi, math -- doesn't mean they shouldn't learn the basics anyway. And elsewhere, what happened to simply learning to do hard things? Writing a piece of fan mail to someone you admire might be nerve-wracking, for kids and even for adults, but sometimes the only way to do something challenging is to sit down and force yourself to do it. Of course, sometimes formulas are helpful. But learning how to build something from a blank page using your own brain, even if the result is formulaic, is a very different process from asking a machine to spit the whole first draft out from scratch. If you only know how to hem, you don't really know how to sew a dress. There's a vast difference between being overly cautious about a technology and having reservations about where and how said technology should be applied. Again, if you're turning to AI to reduce the time that you, in this one short life, are using to send already-robotic company emails, be our guest. But teaching a malleable child who wants to express their admiration to someone who inspires them -- in this case an athlete who, as New York Magazine's Matt Stieb touches on, represents human excellence in their field -- by using a human-mimicking AI instead of what could have been a challenging-yet-rewarding learning experience woefully misses the mark. In other words, throw this AI ad in the garbage heap next to Apple's creativity-annihilating iPad ad. And by the way? We can almost guarantee that the human on the other side would prefer the letter read like it was written by an earnest kid who tried their best, and not like they used a downloaded fan mail template and filled in the blanks like corporate Mad Libs.

Google's Gemini Olympics ad is the very worst way to sell AI -- here's why

Every Olympics needs a villain, an omnipresent force that the citizens of the world can come together as one to root against. And though the 2024 Olympics in Paris are just a few days old as of this writing, a clear contender has emerged in the race to be the undisputed villain of this particular olympiad. My fellow Olympics fans, rise to your feet and give a hearty jeer to the Google Gemini ad, in which a father turns to the AI platform to compose a fan letter to an Olympic sprinter on his daughter's behalf. I've been watching the Olympics on Peacock, so I can't speak as to how frequently this ad is being broadcast on NBC or its many other channels. But on the streaming service, the Gemini ad surfaces with the regularity of an Olympic swimmer coming up for air. And each time the ad appears, my brow furrows, my fist clenches, and my face takes on the dour cast of a Soviet gymnastics judge from back in the day. Quiet simply, the Google Gemini ad enrages because it embraces and celebrates the very worst things about AI-powered tools. If this is how Google is hoping to sell the capabilities of AI in general and Gemini in particular to a dubious public, it's badly missed the mark. The full 1-minute spot from Google starts out innocently enough. A father is telling us about his daughter who's shaping up to be quite the runner -- not unlike U.S. Olympian Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, whose record-breaking exploits are an inspiration to the girl at the heart of the ad. Within 20 seconds, we've seen young children with dreams of glory! A proud father talking up his little girl! An Olympic medalist back for more! What kind of monster would object to any of this? I suggest you keep watching. After Googling for tips on hurdling techniques and getting a Gemini-generated summary -- a perfectly fine use of search tools, I hasten to add -- our dad narrator then veers into shakier territory. "She wants to show Sydney some love," the dad says. "And I'm pretty good with words. But this has to be just right. So, Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is." The ad ends with Gemini composing said letter as the words "A little help from Gemini" flash up on the screen. Well, more than just a little, one might argue, since it's Gemini coming up with all the wording. I have some follow-up questions for Google and/or Gemini: Seriously, there is nothing more personal than a fan letter that expresses how much someone impresses and inspires you. And there is no more impersonal way to compose such a letter than to have a robot do it for you. As someone who gets a lot of email each day, I can tell you it's really easy to spot which ones are form letters, and I'm going to guess that Gemini hasn't cracked the code on how to make such a letter sound like it's coming from the heart. AI-powered features are finding their way into a lot of products as of late, particularly when it comes to the smartphones I spend a lot of time testing and writing about. So I've spent a good portion of the past year trying out various AI features, which has given me some idea of where the technology thrives and where it stumbles. On the phone at least, the best kind of AI features take dull, labor-intensive tasks off my hands so that I can be freed up to do more creative thinking. Transcribing an audio recording is a great example of that, as tackling that by yourself means listening to the audio, typing what you hear, rewinding the audio to make sure you didn't miss anything, and correcting any typos you've made along the way. It is beyond tedious, and it takes a long time, even for a speedy typist. An AI platform can handle that very quickly, if not always as accurately as I would like to see. But still, it's a productivity booster, which is why you'll find that feature on Samsung phones, Pixel devices and -- once iOS 18 is fully released -- iPhones. I saw another great example of how AI can be put to good use this past spring at Google I/O in a demo of Gemini Advanced. The AI platform was able to analyze two documents -- a 522-page PDF and a 144-page one -- and identify topics covered in one document but not the other. That would be a mind-numbing project for a person, but an AI model can handle it with ease. Where AI tends to stumble in my experience is when you ask it to perform the kinds of personal tasks best handled on your own. There's a Chat Assist feature in Galaxy AI that offers to adjust the tone of any text messages you send -- when I tested it, the people I texted with were largely able to figure out which messages came from me and which ones had been tweaked by an algorithm. Having an AI fine-tune your texts -- or your fan letters to Olympians, for that matter -- may tackle any anxiety you have about getting your message across, but it strips you of your humanity in the process. I don't think that's something tech companies should be pushing for in their relentless pursuit to cram AI into every function. And I certainly don't think it's something that should be the cornerstone of a multi-million-dollar ad campaign meant to convince me that AI tools will make my life better. Google would beg to differ, at least based on a statement the company gave to CNN in which it contends that "that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it." The statement goes on to say that ad "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." Which would be a fine counter-argument if, at any point, we saw someone creating something in the ad. All we ever see is Gemini spitting out text. So yeah, not a very good ad. Hopefully, it gets Google to rethink just what it's trying to say about AI and how it goes about saying it. And the next time Google looks to convince people that these tools are about sparking creativity and not superseding it, maybe try doing it without Gemini's input first.

Dear Sydney: Why I find Google's AI Olympics ad so disturbing

Opinion: "Help my daughter write a letter" is not the same as "Help me with boring busywork." If you've watched any Olympics coverage this week, you've likely been confronted with an ad for Google's Gemini AI called "Dear Sydney." In it, a proud father seeks help writing a letter on behalf of his daughter, who is an aspiring runner and superfan of world-record-holding hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. "I'm pretty good with words, but this has to be just right," the father intones before asking Gemini to "Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is..." Gemini dutifully responds with a draft letter in which the LLM tells the runner, on behalf of the daughter, that she wants to be "just like you." Further ReadingEvery time I see this ad, it puts me on edge in a way I've had trouble putting into words (though Gemini itself has some helpful thoughts). As someone who writes words for a living, the idea of outsourcing a writing task to a machine brings up some vocational anxiety. And the idea of someone who's "pretty good with words" doubting his abilities when the writing "has to be just right" sets off alarm bells regarding the superhuman framing of AI capabilities. But I think the most offensive thing about the ad is what it implies about the kinds of human tasks Google sees AI replacing. Rather than using LLMs to automate tedious busywork or difficult research questions, "Dear Sydney" presents a world where Gemini can help us offload a heartwarming shared moment of connection with our children. It's a distressing answer to what's still an incredibly common question in the AI space: What do you actually use these things for? Yes, I can help Marketers have a difficult task when selling the public on their shiny new AI tools. An effective ad for an LLM has to make it seem like a superhuman do-anything machine but also an approachable, friendly helper. An LLM has to be shown as good enough to reliably do things you can't (or don't want to) do yourself, but not so good that it will totally replace you. Microsoft's 2024 Super Bowl ad for Copilot is a good example of an attempt to thread this needle, featuring a handful of examples of people struggling to follow their dreams in the face of unseen doubters. "Can you help me?" those dreamers ask Copilot with various prompts. "Yes, I can help" is the message Microsoft delivers back, whether through storyboard images, an impromptu organic chemistry quiz, or "code for a 3D open world game." The "Dear Sydney" ad tries to fit itself into this same box, technically. The prompt in the ad starts with "Help my daughter..." and the tagline at the end offers "A little help from Gemini." If you look closely near the end, you'll also see Gemini's response starts with "Here's a draft to get you started." And to be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with using an LLM as a writing assistant in this way, especially if you have a disability or are writing in a non-native language. But the subtle shift from Microsoft's "Help me" to Google's "Help my daughter" changes the tone of things. Inserting Gemini into a child's heartfelt request for parental help makes it seem like the parent in question is offloading their responsibilities to a computer in the coldest, most sterile way possible. More than that, it comes across as an attempt to avoid an opportunity to bond with a child over a shared interest in a creative way. It's one thing to use AI to help you with the most tedious parts of your job, as people do in recent ads for Salesforce's Einstein AI. It's another to tell your daughter to go ask the computer for help pouring their heart out to their idol.

The antithesis of the Olympics: Using AI to write a fan letter

In a Google ad during the Olympics, a dad uses AI tool Gemini to write a letter from his daughter to star hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. Screenshot by NPR/YouTube hide caption On Fresh Air in 1986, Maurice Sendak told Terry Gross a story about a little boy who sent him a card and a drawing. Sendak wrote back, including a drawing of his own. Later, the boy's mother wrote Sendak again, explaining that her son loved the response so much that he ate it. To Sendak, this was the ultimate compliment. "He saw it, he loved it, he ate it," he chuckled. Their correspondence stands in contrast to another fan letter many Olympics fans have seen in recent days. During the games, a number of AI ads have been in rotation, but none has raised as many eyebrows as one for Gemini, Google's AI assistant. In the commercial, a father's voiceover explains that his daughter, like him, is a runner. And she's a huge fan of Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. He says he's "pretty good with words," but he wants her fan letter to Sydney to be "just right." Does he help her? Does he encourage her? Does she enter into the process at all? No. He just asks Gemini to write the letter. The prompt: "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. She says sorry, not sorry." I do not like generative AI, but for the sake of research, I fed this prompt - this very prompt! - into Gemini. I am not going to post the result here in full, but I can assure you that if you ranked all the middle managers of your bank from most to least inspiring, went to the one at the bottom, and asked them to write a draft of this letter for you, this is what you would get. The result is obligatory, desultory, boring and obviously machine-made. It contains sentences like, "You've shown the world that with determination, anything is achievable," a toothless flop of a sentence that is, for the record, false. The only - the only! - spark of personality comes in the machine's dutiful inclusion of "sorry not sorry," which Ad Dad put in the prompt. That is not artificial intelligence, it is a program taking the one piece of yourself that you included and spitting it back out, unchanged. The problem with an AI approach to admiration Generative AI advocates have sometimes claimed an interest in helping people with disabilities or people with limited English. Their internal business plans may reveal what role those considerations actually play in their planning, and AI could indeed have some of those applications. The bigger issue is that in many cases, including this one, the marketing of generative AI is a broadside against singularity in favor of digestibility, against creativity in favor of drudgery. It's perfect for anyone who watched the video for Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and rooted for the meat grinder. What Google is selling in this ad is not an assistive device; it is the promised replacement of your flawed humanity with the immaculate verbiage of Google. Immaculate verbiage like, "Watching you compete is like witnessing magic unfold." So if you like your letters awkwardly structured and with all the emotion of a birthday card from your eye doctor, Gemini can help. What a fan letter could be Ad Dad is going about this all wrong. He says Gemini can get the letter "just right." But there is no need for a fan letter to be "just right." There is perhaps no truer example on Earth of "it's the thought that counts" than a letter to someone you admire, telling them how much their work or their example means to you. Ad Dad's daughter could have done anything from writing a short note in her own words to drawing a picture, and it would have been fine. If you do want to help your kid write a fan letter as an exercise, don't give her a tool designed to extrude the average of all the other letters that have come before it. Sit down with her and help her be specific. When did you first see Sydney compete? What does it look like to you when she goes over a hurdle? How do you feel when you see her perform? Do you like her stance? The way she hits a finish line? Her smile when she wins? What do you love about running? And sure, go over spelling with her if you want, too, or help her with her grammar. It's a perfect opportunity. A fan letter is not the beginning of a transaction, or even necessarily an exchange (though it can be that). It is an offering, a gift given in appreciation. Its purpose is not to impress, but to express. That it contains your wild and beautiful self - however imperfect, misspelled, and simple as it may be -- is what makes it valuable. A kid doesn't need a comms strategy or a marketing department. There is all kinds of time for her to learn how to write a proper business letter, or a complaint letter, or a letter to Congress, or a legal brief or business plan. A kid needs to develop confidence that her voice is valuable and should be used. And over time, of course her writing can improve -- but only if she's given a chance to build skills. If you tell her to hit up Gemini when she wants to produce a letter, how will she ever live without it? Choosing a message of "don't practice, just hit this button" is strange anywhere, but it feels downright perverse during the Olympics. All an admirer needs to be is her best self. And who knows? If she genuinely makes a gesture on paper from the bottom of her heart, somebody might become overwhelmed and eat it. It's been known to happen.