Google’s launch of its commercial Gemini AI ad ‘Dear Sydney’, which has since been phased out of the tech company’s Olympic rotation, has received global criticism, with industry insiders arguing its insincerity and lack of humanness.
"I hate it," Campaign Edge executive creative director and founding partner Dee Madigan told AdNews.
"The whole point of a personal letter, especially from a kid, is that it’s personal. AI can be helpful but the one of the things people don’t like about it is that it removes the ‘humanness’...
“And this ad actually highlights that negative. Also he shouldn’t be using AI to train his daughter - it just scrapes the internet for information - it doesn’t know whether it’s correct.”
The 60-second spot, produced by the Google’s in-house creative team, features a father wanting to draft a letter to his daughter’s idol, Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
Instead of conversing with his daughter, he proceeds to use Google’s Gemini AI tool to generate it.
The daughter will end up injured, and also sad, Madigan says.
“Because Sydney will throw her boring AI letter in the bin.”
Rodd Chant, founder and CCO of POTENT, says there’s a time and a place for AI.
But for him, the recent Google Gemini ad for the Olympics misses the mark.
“Wrong time, wrong place. Asking AI to write a letter that should come from the heart takes all the passion and honesty out of the intention,” he says.
“This message encourages children not to think for themselves or express themselves naturally.”
A handwritten note from a child, with maybe a drawing added, is something real, a touching moment, Chant says.
“Shouldn’t the father sit down with his daughter and help her put her feelings down on paper to encourage her creative mind and individual personality to develop?
“I’m excited about what AI can bring to the creative industry in some areas, but it should never replace human imagination.”
Google has disabled Youtube comments on the commercial.
There's been global criticism of the ad, with critics arguing that Google is suggesting that AI is coming for human creativity.
Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications professor of advanced media, Shelly Palmer, says she flatly rejects the future that Google is advertising.
"Google should be ashamed of this messaging. And just to fuel the flames – why did Google reinforce the stereotype of a minority parent being undereducated and insecure about their communicative skills? Everything about the premise of this commercial makes my blood boil," she says.
"The commercial suggests that a poorly worded prompt, processed by a pattern-matching autocomplete algorithm, can empower an LLM to articulate a person’s feelings better than the person themselves. This portrayal is misleading, as it overestimates AI’s ability to understand and convey the nuances of human emotions and thoughts.
"While the use of generative AI for this task may appear valuable at first glance, the results lack the emotional depth that comes from personal expression. Give me a heartfelt message over a grammatically correct, AI generated message any day."
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