I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment

I've seen this ad a hundred times during the Olympics so far (why do they play the same ads over and over?) -- and this article summarizes how it makes me feel very well.

The logical extension of this stuff is insane -- why have kids learn to write at all? They can just have an AI do it. Why learn anything? It's all on the internet anyway.

There are plenty of good use cases for AI generated texts. Creating transcripts from audio, writing meeting summaries, and other types of rote, monotonous tasks. Writing a letter from the heart is not one of those things that should be outsourced.

If there's anything on this earth we should value, it's humanity. And the tech giants are chomping at the bit to take that away. It's a sad vision for the future they're pushing

I’m not the most in touch person in the world but this ad felt super out of touch.

I was having this discussion with someone and they said the problem with tech is they’re just going to teach our kids to be prompt engineers and learn nothing else, and I naively defended the tech industry and said no, of course not, AI will be used to enhance people’s learning of traditional skills, not replace it, and boy does this ad make me feel wrong.

You can tell that Google gave a big advertising agency a truck full of cash and a slight glance at their product and told them to get to work. All their Olympics ads are generic designed-by-committee garbage. Perfect representation of the company's products as a whole these days.

In trying to find a use case for AI, this ad actually sets up the worst possible scenario. All I can think of now is Sydney getting flooded with AI generated fan mail and trying to adjust spam filters.

https://gemini.google.com/share/815f28b9c364 (via https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/07/dear-sydney-why-i-find-go...)

Remember the point of an ad. It's to be memorable, and to get people talking about it. Google wants people talking about Gemini. Well, here we are. I think Google won in this instance. But yes, the ad content is very bad.

A funny coincidence: the Bing AI internal codename was Sydney according to leaked system prompts. I'm sure Google didn't think about that at all, but one could turn it into a metaphor where Google is looking up to Microsoft/OpenAI with intent to eventually pass them.

Maybe I'm becoming too cynical, but now even an op-ed complaining about an ad feels like it might actually itself be a submarine ad in disguise; a "false-flag" attack against your own side to stir the pot and get people thinking about your product. There's no such thing as bad publicity, as they say.

> 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

Thanks. How kind.

> 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.

Petri gets at something much broader: what is the point of tech like Gemini that ostensibly makes some small parts of our lives more efficient when doing so robs them of what makes life worth living in the first place?

> Do you know what writing is?

It is thinking in a form that you can share with other people.

As if ad companies were ever interested in having users who can think...

How doubly ironic: marketing professionals failing to appropriately locate and communicate the value of their product, and doing so by telling a story about a family failing to appropriately locate the value of a fan letter that is meant to communicate a child's adoration.

Could have dropped the title almost completely. “I hate the… ad” would have nailed it.

We are just repeating history.

Webvan advertisement 1999:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOw5i1PJ3vs

I feel fortunate to not know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen this ad. I don’t do ads in my life.

Yeah like the article hints at, I thought it was made by anti-AI folks due to it highlighting exactly the type of AI we don't need at all. Replacing the personal with the impersonal "perfect" spam.

Only Google could mess up such an easy ad concept of athletes and AI.

Barely related: I find it interesting the more I read about engineers refusal to allow their kids near tech, and how often their same companies use kids frequently in advertising.

UnPayWalled: https://archive.ph/7OS2Q

Take-away quotation:

> 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.

> I don’t hate efficiency.

Are any of us trying to be “efficient” when writing a fan letter? I wouldn’t think so. I want a suggestion on how to start.

If I asked an AI for the letter from the ad, I would also have read and edited it heavily before I considered it “complete.”

Maybe TFA author is correct that people need to hear what he’s saying (they won’t), but I for one will be using AI output as suggestions.

Do such ads negatively impact the perception of leadership at Google? It feels like there's no overarching vision of what AI should be from the public face of Google's leadership team, so we end up with stuff like Dear Sydney which just comes off as tone-deaf. Why didn't anyone at Google step-in and say: "hey, maybe this ad isn't very good and it's failing to communicate our values"? Although maybe the explanation is that Google's leadership no longer has any values beyond making infinite amounts of money by any means necessary.

All the AI ads I have seen on TV are like “HOLY SHIT YOU CAN TURN ‘write a sentence’ INTO ‘Hello! This is a sentence which has been written.’ WOWZERS”. It’s so… bad.