Google’s Olympics ad was designed to be uplifting. Instead, many are finding it dystopian
The company shows how AI can help kick-start the writing process, but some just find it “tone deaf.”
Google’s Olympics-themed advertisement for its generative AI chatbot Gemini has some debating what role artificial intelligence should play in our everyday lives.
The advertisement, titled “Dear Sydney” features a dad helping his daughter use Gemini to produce an AI-crafted letter to the daughter’s hero, Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
In the ad, the father asks Gemini to help create 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.)”
On social media, the ad drew backlash from some worried about AI’s role in such an emotional and personal task as writing a fan letter. Several called the message “tone deaf” and accused it of promoting laziness to create a letter devoid of meaning.
“Having a child use Gemini to write a one time letter, that is supposed to be thoughtful, where spelling and grammar mistakes would have surely been forgiven, is just plain dumb. I find myself judging the dad hard lol,” one user wrote on the subreddit r/CommercialsIHate.
Others online said the advertisement, like others promoting Gemini, signaled that tech companies want people to think less and offload creative thinking or social interactions to machines. One such example criticized on Reddit included a Gemini commercial from May that, among other examples, showed a girl asking the chatbot what to say to her friends while they were sitting in front of her.
Shelly Palmer, a media professor at Syracuse University, wrote in a blog post that the father in the ad was acting irresponsibly.
“The father in the video is not encouraging his daughter to learn to express herself. Instead of guiding her to use her own words and communicate authentically, he is teaching her to rely on AI for this critical human skill,” Palmer wrote.
In response to a request for comment, a Google spokesperson said the ad was meant to show how Gemini can provide a starting point or draft to help with the writing process.
“We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it,” the spokesperson said.
Despite the online criticism, the “Dear Sydney” commercial is one of the better performing Olympic advertisements, according to data by ad testing firm System1, cited by Business Insider. The firm gave the ad a 4.4 out of 5.9 (a score it described as “strong”) on its scale of how much the commercial could create long-term growth for the brand. The ad had more than 300,000 views on YouTube as of Thursday.
“It follows a coherent story, focuses on characters with agency and vitality, and prioritizes people over the product,” System1’s chief customer officer Jon Evans told BI. “Additionally, it champions diversity and inclusion by highlighting women in sports, providing young girls with role models.”
