Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
Google is the latest tech giant to misread public opinion around generative AI, after launching an ill-fated advert during the Olympics. Released last Friday as the games began, the ad sees a doting father ask Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, to write a letter from his sport-loving daughter to her idol, the Olympic gold medalist and US hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The criticism was immediate, torrential and especially sharp after Team GB rower Lola Anderson in the same week revealed that, as a teenager bewitched by her own Olympic heroes, she penned a diary entry about her dream of winning gold. The note, which Anderson had binned in embarrassment, was salvaged by her father, who returned it to her before his death from cancer. Anderson’s tearful recollection of how this memento fuelled her journey to Paris 2024 was the emotional, radical – and human – inverse of Google’s maligned and mark-missing ad.
Describing her entry into a small Jack Wills diary, inspired by seeing rowers Helen Glover and Heather Stanning win at London 2012, Anderson recalled: “It’s a piece of paper but it’s the most valuable thing I have, maybe jointly with this medal now.”
The daughter in Google’s Gemini ad will struggle to store her ghostwritten digital letter in a shoebox for posterity. In response to the advert, Twitter and Reddit’s r/CommercialsIHate forum racked up scathing criticism, and Google’s YouTube channel disabled comments beneath the video – an unusual move, silencing debate of its content on a platform it owns.
“Dear Sydney” joins Apple’s “Crushed” commercial in a growing bonfire of poorly considered and badly received in-house adverts, in which the #convenience of technology steamrolls creative, tactile and human experiences.
As Mishal Husain said at our ThinkIn this week, speaking about the handwritten letters of her ancestors, we no longer “document our feelings in the same way.”
