image credit:Google

The universal childhood experience of writing a fan letter to an idol? Mickey Mouse, please save my 1999 Disneyland note.

New Google ads claim AI can achieve that. Not favorably received.

A parent describes his daughter’s admiration for American Olympic track champion Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone in the Olympics’ TV ad break. Google’s AI search function helps the girl train like her hero with hurdling technique recommendations. Then he says “she wants to show Sydney some love,” and asks Google’s Gemini chatbot to write a message from his daughter to McLaughlin, saying she “plans on breaking her world record.”

Google says its AI tool can generate increasingly human-sounding prose for everything from work emails to trip planning, as shown in the ad. But many online critics saw the ad as the latest example of Big Tech disconnecting from actual people. People who watched the ad posted dozens of times on Threads, X, LinkedIn, and elsewhere, asking: Why would anyone want to substitute a child’s originality and real expression with computer-written words?

The internet giant is positioning Gemini as its answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and attempting to integrate the AI technology into Google Search and Gmail, but it missed the mark.

“The Google commercial where the dad has his daughter use AI to construct a note to her favorite athlete rather than encourage her to write what she actually wants to tell her hero takes a little chunk out of my soul every time I see it,” Deadspin founder and writer Will Leitch wrote on X, reposted more than 3,000 times.

“These people have lost the plot,” another Threads user wrote, calling AI commercials “just mortifying.”

Google says it believes “that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it.”

“Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA,” says the statement. “It features a real-life track enthusiast and her father and shows how the Gemini app can help writers find ideas.”

The outcry highlighted a growing concern of artificial intelligence as it enters our lives: Tech businesses promise that AI will make our lives easier by freeing us from monotonous duties like grocery shopping, coding, and translation to focus on more meaningful activities. However, several early AI technologies seem to allow computers to create art, music, and storytelling.

Musicians and visual artists have highlighted concerns about AI replacing them, and it was a major topic in last year’s Hollywood writers’ strike. Some have sued tech companies for using their copyrighted works to train AI algorithms.

However, internet companies have released AI tools that can produce new emojis, speak, and make films.

“I flatly reject the future that Google is advertising,” Syracuse University S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications professor of advanced media Shelly Palmer wrote on Sunday. I want to live in a culturally varied future where billions of people use AI to improve their human skills, not where AI pretends to be human.

Apple received similar backlash earlier this year for an ad that showed paint cans, musical instruments, and a sculptural bust of a human head being crushed by a giant hydraulic press and replaced by an iPad Pro to Sonny & Cher’s “All I Need Is You.” Apple promptly apologized for “missing the mark” in the ad.