Gemini Ad Backlash
Google's "Dear Sydney" ad for Gemini AI has faced backlash for promoting reliance on AI, potentially hindering children's communication skills. Critics argue it undermines personal expression, sparking broader discussions on AI's role in creativity.
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Google's advertisement for its Gemini AI product, titled "Dear Sydney," has faced significant backlash. The ad features a young girl who wishes to write a letter to her idol, Olympic athlete Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, with her father using Gemini AI to draft the letter. Critics argue that the ad promotes an overreliance on generative AI, which could hinder children's learning and communication skills. Media professor Shelly Palmer expressed concerns that such reliance could lead to a homogenized future of expression, diminishing the richness of human language. Public reactions included questions about why the girl did not write the letter herself, with some commentators suggesting that the ad undermines the importance of personal expression. Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri criticized the ad's message, while others echoed similar sentiments on social media. In defense, Google stated that the ad was intended to celebrate Team USA and demonstrate how AI can assist in the creative process without replacing human input. The company emphasized that AI-generated text should serve as a starting point for ideas rather than a substitute for genuine communication. The ad has sparked broader discussions about the implications of AI in creative fields, particularly in light of recent concerns raised during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike regarding the use of AI in scriptwriting.
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8 commentsThere really seems to be almost zero consumer products that people want powered by this stuff. Even chatGPT is mostly laborers trying to do their job more easily.
The idea that AI should write a snarky letter on behalf of a child to their hero makes me sick.
What recipient wants to read an avalanche of AI garbage "from 6 year old fans"? Who would ever respond to this other than to:
Gemini, write a snarky response to this letter you wrote on behalf of this "fan".
I don't block ads. I block being stalked throughout my passage online by 3rd parties that are not even of your choosing. I'll stop blocking your ads when they are no longer stalky.
In the meantime cbsnews.com itself has been added to my DNS blocklist, just in case.
Grumble grumble moan moan.
Maybe GenAI can prepare you for what real people can actually deal with.
I’ve seen this trend where big tech companies so desperately want their product to matter to the most important and emotional things of your life, that they try to shoehorn a perfectly fine product into the most unneeded situations. Think of VisionPro dad recording his child’s birthday, or LLM’s being your therapist?? It feels like coming from a place of insecurity, where in the past technology did affect life’s most important moments (for example the smartphone camera), and they just want to keep trying to recapture that but they can’t force every piece of new technology to fulfill that role.
An ad that showed Gemini proofreading your email, finding grammatical faults and suggesting better words would have been perfectly fine. Or even better an ad that shows how people use Gemini like Google search asking stuff in natural language and receiving correct answers (a lot of LLM’s hallucinate really less now), and even if Olympics isn’t the right platform, an ad just displaying the coding capabilities of these bots would be perfect. Instead we get inundated with this nonsense, next we will get an ad that shows a child write a heartfelt letter to her terminally ill bed ridden mother using Gemini, sigh.
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The opinion piece criticizes Google's Gemini ad for undermining personal expression in writing, warning against reliance on AI, which may diminish individuality and meaningful human connections.
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Google has withdrawn its "Dear Sydney" ad after backlash over its portrayal of AI in communication, with critics arguing it undermines genuine human expression and could hinder children's emotional development.
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