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.
It literally cannot since it has zero insight to your feelings. You are just choosing pretty words you think sound good.
The choices you make have to be based on some kind of logic and inputs with corresponding outputs though, especially on a computer.
The choices you make have to be based on some kind of logic
Sure, the ones I make… the ones the “AI” makes are literally based on statistical correlation to choices millions of other people have made
My prompt to AI (i.e. write a letter saying how much I love Justin Bieber) is actually less personal input, and value, than just writing “you rock” on a piece of paper… no matter what AI spews.
This would be OK for busywork in the office. The complaint here is not that AI is an OK provider of templates, the issue is that it pretends an AI generated fan mail, prompted by the father of the fan (not even the fan themselves) is actually of MORE value than anything the daughter could have put together herself.
Yes, but this is also its own special kind of logic. It’s a statistical distribution.
You can define whatever statistical distribution you want and do whatever calculations you want with it.
The computer can take your inputs, do a bunch of stats calculations internally, then return a bunch of related outputs.
