SAN FRANCISCO: Google confirmed Friday that it has pulled an advertisement for its Gemini artificial intelligence after it failed to go down well with some Olympic viewers.
The “Dear Sydney” ad, meant to promote Gemini AI’s capabilities, featured a father warmly describing how the tool wrote his daughter a fan letter to American hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
However, some viewers criticized the ad for promoting the idea that parents should convince their children to trust AI instead of learning to express themselves.
“While the ad was successfully tested before airing, in light of the feedback we received, we decided to gradually remove it from our Olympic rotation,” a Google spokesperson told AFP.
Social media posts across a variety of platforms questioned whether the ad signaled a dystopian future in which human creativity is stunted by AI.
Shelly Palmer, a media professor at Syracuse University, said the commercial suggested that a poorly worded message to a generative artificial intelligence tool can express a person's feelings better than the person can.
“This commercial featuring someone whose son uses artificial intelligence to write a fan letter to his hero is rubbish,” wrote author Linda Holmes in a post on BlueSky.
“Who wants a fan letter written by an AI?”
Technology evangelists have touted the promised benefits of AI, but teachers, musicians, artists and others have accused its creators of training advanced computers to replace them.
Earlier this year, Apple had its own advertising stumble with a commercial that showed musical instruments, paint cans and other creative equipment crushed and replaced by an iPad set to a song titled “All I Ever Need Is You.”
