If you’ve watched any Olympics coverage this week, you’ve likely been confronted with an ad for Google’s Gemini AI called “Dear Sydney.” In it, a proud father seeks help writing a letter on behalf of his daughter, who is an aspiring runner and superfan of world-record-holding hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
“I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right,” the father intones before asking Gemini to “Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is…” Gemini dutifully responds with a draft letter in which the LLM tells the runner, on behalf of the daughter, that she wants to be “just like you.”
I think the most offensive thing about the ad is what it implies about the kinds of human tasks Google sees AI replacing. Rather than using LLMs to automate tedious busywork or difficult research questions, “Dear Sydney” presents a world where Gemini can help us offload a heartwarming shared moment of connection with our children.
Inserting Gemini into a child’s heartfelt request for parental help makes it seem like the parent in question is offloading their responsibilities to a computer in the coldest, most sterile way possible. More than that, it comes across as an attempt to avoid an opportunity to bond with a child over a shared interest in a creative way.
“This message really needs to be passionate and demonstrate my emotional investment, I’d better have a text generation algorithm do it for me”
Yeah, fully agree. This is one of the reasons big tech is dangerous with AI, their sense of humanity and their instincts on what’s right are way off.
Oozes superficiality. Say anything do anything for market share.
It’s 2027, the AI killer app never came, but LLMification has produced an unimaginable glut of mediocre media and the most popular AI application is to use it to find human sourced material.
The stock market is like a ship on fire, but you can buy video cards for pennies on the dollar.
The obvious missing element is another AI on Sydney’s end to summarize all the fan mail into a one-number sentiment score. At that point we can eliminate both the AIs and the mental effort, and just send each other single numbers via an ad-sponsored Google service.
Which they will unceremoniously murder after it fails to get enough traction in a month after launch.
Hey, my buddy’s work is already doing that! Management no longer has any idea what the company does, but they know how often you click. It boils down to a decimal number, which is what they really need. Higher numbers are better.
It would’ve been cooler if they used it to write a cool PDF page of info and stats on Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone
Or finding/buying plane tickets at the best price by searching all the sites
But that would imply that it can be relied upon for accuracy.
This ad is on purpose, to make us believe that using AI like this is the most normal thing. It’s kind of brainwashing. So they can sell it to us.
This! I was appalled when this ad played, suggesting that ANYONE comes out of that fictional scenario pleased is ridiculous. No one wants to receive a crappy AI-written email, ESPECIALLY when the primary topic is emotional. Using an LLM to write a message for a loved one tells everyone that you don’t actually care enough to write it yourself. And Google is putting their big check of approval on the whole scenario saying, “This is what we want you to use Gemini for.” Absolutely abysmal.
The ONLY version of this ad that makes any sense is if the parent writing the email is illiterate or has a medical issue where they can’t type. But I’d rather see them use AI to make dictation better and more powerful instead.
We’re all switching to Kagi Search and moving our email to ProtonMail or the like right? I don’t need this kind of crap in my digital tool kit.
Hate to say it, but Kagi is not great. Both in results and in stewardship.
Proton recently introduced an AI “writing assistant” for emails called Scribe and a bitcoin wallet sadly.
The people making these ads can’t fathom anything past pure efficiency. It’s what their entire job revolves around, efficiently using corporate resources to maximize the amount of people using or paying for a product.
Sure, I would like to be more efficient when writing, but that doesn’t mean writing the whole letter for me, it means giving me pointers on how to start it, things to emphasize, or how to reword something that doesn’t sound quite right, so I don’t spend 10 minutes staring at an email wondering if the way I worded it will be taken the wrong way.
AI is a tool, it is not a replacement for humans. Trying to replace true human interaction with an LLM is like trying to replace an experienced person’s job with a freshly hired intern with no experience. Sure, they can technically do the job, but they won’t do it well. It’s only a benefit when the intern works with the existing knowledgeable individuals in the field to do better work.
If we try to use AI to replace the entire process, we just end up with this:
That flowchart example is idiotic but I love it. The formal cover letter in between is more idiotic. It would be cool if we could collectively agree to just send “I’d like this job” instead of all the bullshit.
But, you and everyone else would just say “I want this job” but they want the best person for the job. Putting up with bullshit is invariably going to be part of the job.
They can compare my resume with the other applicants’. I don’t mind.
A lot of what we do as a society is redundant, but I do think fully written emails or cover letters have merit (even if it’s the same template replicated for multiple applications,)
It helps the reviewer understand if you’re articulate with your speech, gives them additional context to your resume, and lets them better match applicants with their current work environment.
That said, a lot of the process is still redundant anyways, and considering many hiring processes are now entirely automated, a more concise, standardized method of providing the same information would likely be more manageable and efficient for most people.
There’s already too many applicants for every job opening. If you make the process even more automated public job listings/applicants will be sidelined entirely.
My team hired a jr dev a few months ago. The posting got several thousand responses on LinkedIn alone. We noped out of wading through all of those and just went the referral route.
Glad to see others have also keyed in on just how lame this ad was.
My immediate thought was, if you (the guy doing the voiceover as the father) are so mentally deficient that you can’t even put together a four sentence paragraph of your own original thoughts for fanmail, then what hope do you have of doing anything else as a functioning adult?
Worse yet, what does this teach the kid?
I wonder what would happen if the world found out that Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (or any other celebrity/athlete/role model) was using Chat GPT to respond to fan mail. My gut feeling is that people would find it disingenuous at best – and there would probably be significant outrage.
Where’s the AI that does my dishes and cleans my house so I have more time to write, create, and connect with others? That’s the technology I want – not one that does the meaningful part and leaves the menial stuff up to me.
It teaches the kid to rely more and more on AI for everything, just like Google wants.
They’re already ‘thanking’ siri and alexa, this will be a very dangerous development.
Roko’s basilisk is kind of bullshit but the meme is funny.
rokos basilisk is the most stupidest thing and I hate it so much. it’s so obviously just plain wrong. it’s just wrong. it’s not even an interpretation thing. most stupidest and insane and useless idea ever.
edit: I’m still mad at that one YouTuber that did a video about rokos basilisk pretending it made even a little bit of sense.
It’s creepypasta for edgelad nerds
Thanking a personified character doesn’t strike me as a bad thing.
Surely theres a more positive perspective where people are just naturally polite in their words and would struggle to communicate differently to a language bot.
It’s pretty frustrating how the venn diagram of ‘people who treat people like things’, and ‘people who treat things like people’ is a near circle.
Wow, this is an unfair take and very judgemental. I can think of a dozen reasons why an adult might have trouble writing a letter aside from being “mentally deficient.” Dyslexia, anxiety, poor education, not being a native speaker, ADHD, etc.
Trust me, I thought the ad was lame and a bleak use case for AI, but you don’t have to crucify a parent for doing their best to help their kid.
Dyslexia, anxiety, poor education, not being a native speaker, ADHD, etc.
That “etc.” certainly includes living in an anti-intellectual society full of emotionally stunted people who learned that men shouldn’t care about feelings and that reading is for dorks.
lists mental deficiencies
You… you joke, but I know a few parents who would absolutely fail at something like this. Hell, they fail at basic math, and are barely literate.
I’m not saying this is a great idea for everyone, or that the ad is good. But the idea that “no one needs this” is extremely short sighted. For god sakes, the literacy rate in America alone isn’t even 95%, and over 50% of Americans aren’t proficient in English.
Again. This ad sucks for lots of reasons. But don’t pretend idiots can’t make it through adulthood, never mind become parents. The idiots are usually the ones with the most kids.
AI systems are still a useful tool.
It should be like a core memory for the kid to do this with her dad. It’s like having an LLM to play catch or do tea parties with her.
It’s like the South Park episode about using chatgpt to message their SO
Was kinda suprised I forgot about this one lol. Such a great episode.
I think AI is great, but not for this. It’s much better suited for, say, stuff like AI dungeon, or other entertainment (DougDoug on twitch/YouTube is the perfect example).
deleted by creator
Well said.
Once you realize that everyone that works in marketing is a soulless demon, the world starts to make a lot more sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCPhbN1l024 Futurama at it again.
I’ve been watching quite a lot of Olympics coverage on TV, but never seen any ads. Is there an official Olympics TV channel with these ads?
