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 is one of the weirdest of several weird things about the people who are marketing AI right now
I went to ChatGPT right now and one of the auto prompts it has is “Message to comfort a friend”
If I was in some sort of distress and someone sent me a comforting message and I later found out they had ChatGPT write the message for them I think I would abandon the friendship as a pointless endeavor
What world do these people live in where they’re like “I wish AI would write meaningful messages to my friends for me, so I didn’t have to”
The thing they’re trying to market is a lot of people genuinely don’t know what to say at certain times. Instead of replacing an emotional activity, its meant to be used when you literally can’t do it but need to.
Obviously that’s not the way it should go, but it is an actual problem they’re trying to talk to. I had a friend feel real down in high school because his parents didn’t attend an award ceremony, and I couldn’t help cause I just didn’t know what to say. AI could’ve hypothetically given me a rough draft or inspiration. Obviously I wouldn’t have just texted what the AI said, but it could’ve gotten me past the part I was stuck on.
In my experience, AI is shit at that anyway. 9 times out of 10 when I ask it anything even remotely deep it restates the problem like “I’m sorry to hear your parents couldn’t make it”. AI can’t really solve the problem google wants it to, and I’m honestly glad it can’t.
They’re trying to market emotion because emotion sells.
It’s also exactly what AI should be kept away from.
But ai also lies and hallucinates, so you can’t market it for writing work documents. That could get people fired.
Really though, I wonder if the marketing was already outsourced to the LLM?
Sadly, after working in Advertising for over 10 years, I know how dumb the art directors can be about messaging like this. It why I got out.
A lot of the times when you don’t know what to say, it’s not because you can’t find the right words, but the right words simply don’t exist. There’s nothing that captures your sorrow for the person.
Funny enough, the right thing to say is that you don’t know what to say. And just offer yourself to be there for them.
The article makes a mention of the early part of the movie Her, where he’s writing a heartfelt, personal card that turns out to be his job, writing from one stranger to another. That reference was exactly on target: I think most of us thought outsourcing such a thing was a completely bizarre idea, and it is. It’s maybe even worse if you’re not even outsourcing to someone with emotions but to an AI.
I would abandon the friendship as a pointless endeavor
You’re in luck, you can subscribe to an AI friend instead. /s
You’ve seen porn addiction yes, but have you seen AI boyfriend emotional attachment addiction?
Guaranteed to ruin your life! Act now.
Uhh “subscribing to an AI friend” is technically possible in the form of character.ai sub. Not that I recommend it but in this day your statement is not sarcastic.
If I was in some sort of distress and someone sent me a comforting message and I later found out they had ChatGPT write the message for them I think I would abandon the friendship as a pointless endeavor
My initial response is the same as yours, but I wonder… If the intent was to comfort you and the effect was to comfort you, wasn’t the message effective? How is it different from using a cell phone to get a reminder about a friend’s birthday rather than memorizing when the birthday is?
One problem that both the AI message and the birthday reminder have is that they don’t require much effort. People apparently appreciate having effort expended on their behalf even if it doesn’t create any useful result. This is why I’m currently making a two-hour round trip to bring a birthday cake to my friend instead of simply telling her to pick the one she wants, have it delivered, and bill me. (She has covid so we can’t celebrate together.) I did make the mistake of telling my friend that I had a reminder in my phone for this, so now she knows I didn’t expend the effort to memorize the date.
Another problem that only the AI message has is that it doesn’t contain information that the receiver wants to know, which is the specific mental state of the sender rather than just the presence of an intent to comfort. Presumably if the receiver wanted a message from an AI, she would have asked the AI for it herself.
Anyway, those are my Asperger’s musings. The next time a friend needs comforting, I will tell her “I wish you well. Ask an AI for inspirational messages appropriate for these circumstances.”
Another problem that only the AI message has is that it doesn’t contain information that the receiver wants to know, which is the specific mental state of the sender rather than just the presence of an intent to comfort.
I don’t think the recipient wants to know the specific mental state of the sender. Presumably, the person is already dealing with a lot, and it’s unlikely they’re spending much time wondering what friends not going through it are thinking about. Grief and stress tend to be kind of self-centering that way.
The intent to comfort is the important part. That’s why the suggestion of “I don’t know what to say, but I’m here for you” can actually be an effective thing to say in these situations.
“Dear Sydney” presents a world where Gemini can help us offload a heartwarming shared moment of connection with our children.
This is the problem I’ve had with the LLM announcements when they first came out. One of their favorite examples is writing a Thank You note.
The whole point of a Thank You note is that you didn’t have to write it, but you took time out of your day anyways to find your own words to thank someone.
Companies like Google don’t understand how advanced AI algorithms work. They can sort of represent things like emotions by encoding relationships between high level concepts and trying to relate things together using logic.
This usually just means they’ll echo the emotions of whomever gave them input and amplify them to make some form of art, though.
People with power at Google are often very hateful people who will say hurtful things to each other, especially about concepts like money or death.
Although I will use it to write resumes and cover letters when applying to jobs from now on. They use AI to weed out resumes. I figure the only way to beat that system is to use it against itself.
As an engineering manager, I’ve already received AI cover letters. Don’t do that. They suck. They get “round filed” faster than no cover letter at all. It’s insulting.
(Realistically if I couldn’t tell the difference then it would be fine, but right now it’s so fucking obvious.)
But apparently you’re not using AI to filter the resumes. A huge number of companies are. 42% as of this year.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240214-ai-recruiting-hiring-software-bias-discrimination
Robot, experience this dramatic irony for me!
So in the spring I got a letter from a student telling me how much they appreciate me as a teacher. At the time I was going through some s***. Still am frankly. So it meant a lot to me.That was such a nice letter.
I read it again the next day and realized it was too perfect. Some of the phrasing just didn’t make sense for a high school student. Some of the punctuation.
I have no doubt the student was sincere in their appreciation for me, But once I realized what they had done It cheapened those happy feelings. Blah.
That’s the problem with how they are doing it, everyone seems to want AI to do everything, everywhere.
It is now getting on my own nerves, because more and more customers want to have somehow AI integrated in their websites, even when they don’t have a use for it.
I’m curious, if they had gone to their parent, gave them the same info, and come to the same message… would it have been less cheap feeling?
And do you know that isn’t the case? “Hey mom, I’m trying to write something nice to my teacher, this is what I have but it feels weird can you make a suggestion?” Is a perfectly reasonable thing to have happened.
I think there’s a different amount of effort involved in the two scenarios and that does matter. In your example, the kid has already drafted the letter and adding in a parent will make it take longer and involve more effort. I think the assumption is they didn’t go to AI with a draft letter but had it spit one out with a much easier to create prompt.
… But why did it cheapen it when they’re the one that sent it to you? Because someone helped them write it, somehow the meaning is meaningless?
That seems positively callous in the worst possible way.
It’s needless fear mongering because it doesn’t count because of arbitrary reason since it’s not how we used to do things in the good old days.
No encyclopedia references… No using the internet… No using Wikipedia… No quoting since language and experience isn’t somehow shared and built on the shoulders of the previous generations with LLMs being the equivalent of a literal human reference dictionary that people want to say but can’t recall themselves or simply want to save time in a world where time is more precious than almost anything lol.
The only reason anyone shouldn’t like AI is due to the power draw. And nearly every AI company is investing more in renewables than anyone everyone else while pretending like data centers are the bane of existence while they write on Lemmy watching YouTube and playing an online game lol.
David Joyner in his article On Artificial Intelligence and Authenticity gives an excellent example on how AI can cheapen the meaning of the gift: the thought and effort that goes into it.
In the opening synchronous meeting for one such class this semester, I was asked about this policy: if the work itself is the same, what does it matter whether it came from AI or not? I explained my thoughts with an analogy: imagine you have an assistant, whether that is an executive assistant at work or a family assistant at home or anyone else whose professional role is helping you with your role. Then, imagine your child’s (or spouse’s, I actually can’t remember which example I used in class) birthday is coming up. You could go out and shop for a present yourself, but you’re busy, so you ask this assistant to go pick out something. If your child found out that your assistant picked out the gift instead of you, would we consider it reasonable for them to be disappointed, even if the gift itself is identical to the one you would have purchased?
My class (those that spoke up, at least) generally agreed yes, it would be reasonable to expect the child to be disappointed: the gift is intended to represent more than just its inherent usefulness and value, but also the thought and effort that went into obtaining it. I continued the analogy by asking: now imagine if the gift was instead a prize selected for an employee-of-the-month sort of program. Would it be as disappointing for the assistant to buy it in that case? Likely not: in that situation, the gift’s value is more direct.
The assistant parallel is an interesting one, and I think that comes out in how I use LLMs as well. I’d never ask an assistant to both choose and get a present for someone; but I could see myself asking them to buy a gift I’d chosen. Or maybe even do some research on a particular kind of gift (as an example, looking through my gift ideas list I have “lightweight step stool” for a family member. I’d love to outsource the research to come up with a few examples of what’s on the market, then choose from those.). The idea is mine, the ultimate decision would be mine, but some of the busy work to get there was outsourced.
Last year I also wrote thank you letters to everyone on my team for Associate Appreciation Day with the help of an LLM. I’m obsessive about my writing, and I know if I’d done that activity from scratch, it would have easily taken me 4 hours. I cut it down to about 1.5hrs by starting with a prompt like, “Write an appreciation note in first person to an associate who…” then provided a bulleted list of accomplishments of theirs. It provided a first draft and I modified greatly from there, bouncing things off the LLM for support.
One associate was underperforming, and I had the LLM help me be “less effusive” and to “praise her effort” more than her results so I wasn’t sending a message that conflicted with her recent review. I would have spent hours finding the right ways of doing that on my own, but it got me there in a couple exchanges. It also helped me find synonyms.
In the end, the note was so heavily edited by me that it was in my voice. And as I said, it still took me ~1.5 hours to do for just the three people who reported to me at the time. So, like in the gift-giving example, the idea was mine, the choice was mine, but I outsourced some of the drafting and editing busy work.
IMO, LLMs are best when used to simplify or support you doing a task, not to replace you doing them.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
