Google reportedly pulled a TV commercial ad it ran during the Olympics coverage. It depicts an African American father using Google’s AI assistant Gemini to help his daughter write a fan letter for his daughter to U.S. Olympic team hurdler Sydney McClaughlin-Levrone.
The commercial doesn’t say that Gemini wrote the final letter, but it does show it writing the beginning of a draft letter for his young daughter.
Perhaps I’m too much of a traditionalist when it comes to writing, but I do worry that relying on AI to write and read things for us will make us all dumber. (Just as automated driving will make us all unable to drive on our own, at least one day.) I’m glad others found the ad disturbing (on several levels). I wrote about this topic in a prior post, and my concerns haven’t dissipated.
And it’s downright surprising Google keeps on fumbling its AI business forays.