Google pulls its terrible pro-AI "Dear Sydney" ad after backlash

Google spoiled this opportunity to advance society's ethical relationship with computers, in a healthy way, by offloading the father's responsibility of teaching the child relationship skills to an LLM.

* Where are the boundaries of what is appropriate? The Father is the escort for the Child, in this scenario. The child loses track of themselves throughout this process. The LLM statistically chooses how to relate to the admired Olympian. ALL the words sent to the Olympian are LLM's, there is ZERO VOICE from the child, save from what the Father types into the Gemini AI prompt.

* The father projects -- in the psychological sense -- his expectations on to the child @ https://youtu.be/NgtHJKn0Mck?si=3e6GEHw6tcDAA-iy&t=34

This exacerbates an unhealthy 'drowning' of the self, in favor of waiting for society to phrase that for her, via the LLM's training.

The power of words are what are being devalued. It makes what the daughter has to say worthless. It is tragic, and unethical.

Remember when Google wasnt just a bunch of mouth-breathers with MBAs their daddies bought for them? Pepperidge Farm® remembers.

They cant even apologize right they just pull out their "victim mentality" card like a bunch of spoiled brats. Crying about how people liked the ad in internal testing which just means the executive who thought of it showed it to his wife and she said she liked it through her vicodin haze.

A point of view I haven't seen expressed yet: if I was the athlete, I'd value a terribly written letter by a child above one written by the parent of a child, let alone by AI.

It's the same reason I value the handmade cards my niblings have made me. They're barely legible, objectively bad, and that's exactly what makes them special. Half the store-bought cards are pretty quickly destined for the bin, but those are staying on the mantle.

I remember Sydney was the internal name for Bing’s AI chatbot, but it got really pissy if you pointed that out. Almost made you feel bad for the poor emotionally damaged thing.

I know I'm going to get a lot of hate for this, but why is everyone freaking out about this ad?

Yes, make all the jokes about "why not just send the prompt directly to the famous person" you want, but the reality is that "hidden centaurs" i.e. "people using AI who successfully convince you that they didn't" is extremely rapidly rising, and thank goodness for it! Just because Google doesn't actually make that as well as open source tools with dozens of settings to tune doesn't mean that they should get so much hate for simply showing off a feature that others will undoubtly use their product for.

If a kid sends an AI-generated letter to a celebrity and no one notices, was the outrage ever justified?

The answer should be "No", but everyone is going to freakout and bemoan the death of education and act like folks haven't been leaning on aids forever. Calculators were a huge net benefit for society, and math education which uses them meaningfully is far superior to that which doesn't. If you refuse to acknowledge that this is your childs future, all you do is risk them being left behind.

See the outcomes of folks taught statistics by hand vs with matlab/R as further evidence for "Luddites are idiots" and the same nonsense thought cliche bleeds here with the outrage caused by this ad

I find it so funny that all the articles about this thing are so heavy handed about what you, the reader, are supposed to think about it. The ad is cute and the tech is good tool when you're not sure what kinds of things typically go into a piece of communication. There are lots of implicit rules about what's "supposed" to go into them.

I had to write a letter of recommendation recently and had not done one before so I did literally what happened in the commercial and had gipty write a first draft. I suddenly had a tailor-made scaffold of what the letter was supposed to look like, the expected level of formality, and topics I should cover. I rewrote it using the LLM response as a rough guide and when I sent it out my coworkers praised "how good with words" I am. And ya'know what, I am good with words but I also have a strong voice with an informal talkative tone that is hard to shake when I need to write business-formal. But the LLM has absorbed all those rules and can help me bridge the gap.