Google’s Olympics ad went viral for all the wrong reasons

By Clare Duffy, CNN

New York (CNN) — Remember the universal childhood experience of writing a fan letter to someone you admire? (Mickey Mouse, I hope you still have that note I gave you at Disneyland in 1999.)

Well, a new Google ad says artificial intelligence can now do that for you. It’s not going over well.

In case you haven’t seen it, the TV advertisement — which played during ad breaks from the Olympics — shows a father describing his daughter’s love for American Olympic track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. It shows the young girl training to compete like her hero, thanks to hurdling technique tips generated by Google’s AI search feature. Then the dad says “she wants to show Sydney some love,” and asks Google’s Gemini chatbot to generate a letter from his daughter to McLaughlin, including a line noting that the young girl “plans on breaking her world record.”

The ad demonstrated the Google AI tool’s ability to generate increasingly human-sounding text, a capability the company has said could be used for everything from writing work emails to trip plans. But to many critics online, the ad appeared to be the latest example of a Big Tech company being disconnected from real people. The ad inspired dozens of posts on Threads, X, LinkedIn and elsewhere, where many people who watched it were asking: Why would anyone want to replace a child’s creativity and authentic expression with words written by a computer?

It’s a striking miss for the tech giant, which has positioned Gemini as its answer to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is working to incorporate the AI technology throughout its suite of products, including Google Search and Gmail.

“The Google commercial where the dad has his daughter use AI to construct a note to her favorite athlete rather than encourage her to write what she actually wants to tell her hero takes a little chunk out of my soul every time I see it,” writer and founder of sports blog Deadspin Will Leitch said on X, in a post that was reposted more than 3,000 times.

“These people have lost the plot,” another person said of the ad in a post on Threads, calling AI ads in general “just mortifying.”

A Google spokesperson said in a statement that the company believes “that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it.”

“Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA,” the statement reads. “It showcases a real-life track enthusiast and her father, and 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.”

The backlash underscored a broader fear about artificial intelligence, as the technology permeates more and more areas of our lives: Tech companies have promised that AI will make our lives easier by removing the need for humans to complete menial tasks, like grocery shopping, coding or translation, that could otherwise be done by computers, freeing them up to spend time on more meaningful pursuits. But many early AI tools seem to do the opposite, instead enabling computers to generate traditionally human creative outputs such as art, music and stories.

Some creatives, including musicians and visual artists, have already raised alarms about AI replacing them — and it was a central issue in last year’s Hollywood writers’ strike. And others have sued tech firms over the alleged use of their copyrighted works to train their AI models.

And yet tech firms have forged ahead with rolling out AI tools that can create new emojis, speak and even generate videos.

“I flatly reject the future that Google is advertising,” Shelly Palmer, professor of advanced media at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, said in a blog post on Sunday. “I want to live in a culturally diverse world where billions of individuals use AI to amplify their human skills, not in a world where we are used by AI pretending to be human.”

Apple faced similar backlash earlier this year when it released an ad for that showed symbols of human creativity – paint cans, musical instruments, a sculptural bust of a human head – being crushed by a giant hydraulic press and replaced by an iPad Pro, to the tune of Sonny & Cher’s “All I Need Is You.” Apple quickly apologized for “missing the mark” with the advertisement.

Google did not respond to CNN’s request for comment regarding the backlash to the Gemini ad.

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