Mother Jones illustration; Google
It was about this time last week when I first saw that ad for Gemini, Google’s new artificial-intelligence chatbot. If you’ve been watching much of the Paris Olympics, you know the one I’m thinking of. The spot, called “Dear Sydney,” features a father whose daughter idolizes the American hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. His daughter “wants to show Sydney some love,” and while he describes himself as “pretty good with words,” the dad adds, “This has to be just right.”
“Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is,” he types, “and be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day.”
I have never seen an ad that made me so thoroughly depressed about the product it was selling, and I watch Trump ads for my job. Why would you get a robot to write a fan letter from your daughter? What other meaningful personal interactions are we supposed to want to swap out with a multimodal large language model?
And apparently I’m not alone. For days I kept seeing people bring up the ad. It “takes a little chunk out of my soul every time I see it,” New York magazine contributing editor Will Leitch wrote, in one representative take. On Friday, Hollywood Reporter offered some good news: Google was taking the spot off the airwaves. We did it, Joe.
“Dear Sydney” was as honest as it was bleak: This is what the people pushing AI like about AI. These are the people who watched Her but missed the point.
When I watched it, I was struck not by the obvious soullessness, but of the collective arrogance that went into making it. This was the outward expression of an industry that seemingly has no self-awareness of the considerable misgivings people have it, or simply doesn’t care. “Dear Sydney” was as honest as it was bleak: This is what the people pushing AI like about AI. These are the people who watched Her but missed the point.
The use case for this kind of AI, at this particular moment, is to take the work that a human can do with care and replace it with a bot that can neither feel nor think. In a lot of cases, the hope—the hope!—is that jobs people do now will not exist. But in plenty of other cases, it will just make the jobs that people do have a little bit more soul-crushing. It is grim but understandable that tech oligarchs find this desirable. But it portends something far darker about the world, I think, if it turns out that vast numbers of people really are clamoring for “art” without artists, “news” without news outlets, and letters from children without the children.
Just a few months ago, a similar ad from Apple was pulled after producing a similar response. That one featured a hydraulic press crushing various tools of human creativity—paint, musical instruments, sculptures. These AI products, such as they are, are aimed at people who wish they could outsource and rip off the things that actually make us human. All you can do is keep shouting at these weirdos until they retreat.
