Outsourcing emotion: The horror of Google’s “Dear Sydney” AI ad | The company suggests using AI to write a child’s fan letter and the ad is so bad that Google turned off comments for it on YouTube
Outsourcing emotion: The horror of Google’s “Dear Sydney” AI ad | The company suggests using AI to write a child’s fan letter and the ad is so bad that Google turned off comments for it on YouTube
Opinion: "Help my daughter write a letter" is not the same as "Help me with boring busywork."
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”
"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.
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.
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?
That's not fan mail. That's spam.
The people making these ads can't fathom anything past pure efficiency. It's what their entire job revolves around, efficiently using corporate resources to maximize the amount of people using or paying for a product.
Sure, I would like to be more efficient when writing, but that doesn't mean writing the whole letter for me, it means giving me pointers on how to start it, things to emphasize, or how to reword something that doesn't sound quite right, so I don't spend 10 minutes staring at an email wondering if the way I worded it will be taken the wrong way.
AI is a tool, it is not a replacement for humans. Trying to replace true human interaction with an LLM is like trying to replace an experienced person's job with a freshly hired intern with no experience. Sure, they can technically do the job, but they won't do it well. It's only a benefit when the intern works with the existing knowledgeable individuals in the field to do better work.
If we try to use AI to replace the entire process, we just end up with this:
I said all these things to my partner when I saw the ad as well.
I've spent more time helping my kid write Steam reviews of the games they're playing than this Dad did on writing a letter to his daughter's hero.
Simple as. Don't be surprised when the kid puts you in a crappy home to afford more Gemini credit or whatever.
Once you realize that everyone that works in marketing is a soulless demon, the world starts to make a lot more sense.
Okay. I'm a transhumanist. I like AI, automation, and the abolishment of involuntary labor as well as obligatory adversity. Even I thought this ad was super fucking creepy. How the fuck do you justify sending your daughter an auto-generated letter? Now, not only do you not care enough to do it yourself, you're lying to her about it.
Let's say that there is a single player MMO where all the other players are played by AI, but it is done so well that you can't really see the difference from real-human MMO players.
Would you play this? I would not. The fact that there is a human on the other side is important, even though it does not make any practical difference. Same with birthday wishes - that's way Facebook did not automate "Happy birthday!" even though it could.
Would you upload your personal data and voice to Open AI for it to make a a birthday wishes call to your mom? So convinient! She won't know the difference, and you get a 5 bulletpoint summary afterwards! Such a hellscape.
Reminds me of the movie Her, where all kinds of heartfelt letters were outsourced to professional agencies.
Thank you! The ads from everywhere this Olympics have been so fucking weird. I even started a thread on mastodon and this ad was on it. https://hachyderm.io/@ch00f/112861965493613935
"This message really needs to be passionate and demonstrate my emotional investment, I'd better have a text generation algorithm do it for me"
"Hey Google, please write a letter from my family, addressed to me, that pretends that they love me deeply, and approve of me wholly, even though I am a soulless, emotionless ghoul that longs for the day we'll have truly functional AR glasses, so that I can superimpose stock tickers over the top of their worthless smiles."
This! I was appalled when this ad played, suggesting that ANYONE comes out of that fictional scenario pleased is ridiculous. No one wants to receive a crappy AI-written email, ESPECIALLY when the primary topic is emotional. Using an LLM to write a message for a loved one tells everyone that you don't actually care enough to write it yourself. And Google is putting their big check of approval on the whole scenario saying, "This is what we want you to use Gemini for." Absolutely abysmal.
The ONLY version of this ad that makes any sense is if the parent writing the email is illiterate or has a medical issue where they can't type. But I'd rather see them use AI to make dictation better and more powerful instead.
We're all switching to Kagi Search and moving our email to ProtonMail or the like right? I don't need this kind of crap in my digital tool kit.
Yeah, fully agree. This is one of the reasons big tech is dangerous with AI, their sense of humanity and their instincts on what's right are way off.
Oozes superficiality. Say anything do anything for market share.
It's 2027, the AI killer app never came, but LLMification has produced an unimaginable glut of mediocre media and the most popular AI application is to use it to find human sourced material.
The stock market is like a ship on fire, but you can buy video cards for pennies on the dollar.
And Google turned off display of dislikes. Although it was for Apple's ad.
This ad is on purpose, to make us believe that using AI like this is the most normal thing. It's kind of brainwashing. So they can sell it to us.
The thing is, LLMs can be used for something like this, but just like if you asked a stranger to write a letter for your loved one and only gave them the vaguest amount of information about them or yourself you're going to end up with a really generic letter.
...but to give me amount of info and detail you would need to provide it with, you would probably end up already writing 3/4 of the letter yourself which defeats the purpose of being able to completely ignore and write off those you care about!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCPhbN1l024 Futurama at it again.
God I hope that all of these bullshit AI platforms tank these giant awful tech companies.
When i saw this ad a few days ago, my immediate, audible, response was " I guess we don't need humans anymore. "
I think AI has already taken over and it's putting out the ads.
New movie just dropped Violet evergarden: Gemini's dream
Idk, I mean I think this is more honest and practical LLM advertising than what we've seen before
I like to say AI is good at what I'm bad at. I'm bad at writing emails, putting my emotions out there (unless I'm sleep deprived up to the point I'm past self consciousness), and advocating for my work. LLMs do what takes me hours in a few seconds, even running locally on my modest hardware.
AI will not replace workers without significant qualitative advancements... It can sure as hell smooth the edges in my own life
Dear Sydney...
I think AI is great, but not for this. It's much better suited for, say, stuff like AI dungeon, or other entertainment (DougDoug on twitch/YouTube is the perfect example).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfEEAfjb8Ko
Now we need the machine to write a handwritten letter, and sign it. To complete the effect of genuine human connection
I saw a movie the other day, and all of the ads before the previews were about AI. It was awful, and I hated it. One of them was this one, and yes... Terrible.
This and the Nike ad have been the worst ads during the Olympics.
I saw a similar ad in theaters this week, it started by asking Gemini to write a breakup letter and I thought my friend next to me was going to cry because she's going through a breakup but then right at the end it goes "...to my old phone, because the Pixel 9 is just so cool!"
Gemini is awesome, I use it all the time for applied algebra and coding but using it to replace human emotions is not awesome. Google can do better
I've been watching quite a lot of Olympics coverage on TV, but never seen any ads. Is there an official Olympics TV channel with these ads?
Being a non native English speaker this is actually one of the better uses of LLMs for me. When I need to write in "fancier" English I ask LLMs and use it as an initial point (sometimes end up doing heavy modifications sometimes light). I mean this is one of the more logical uses of LLM, it is good at languages (unlike trying to get it to solve math problems).
And I dont agree with the pov that just because you use LLM output to find a good starting point it stops being personal.
Desperation...
Meh. How many people used to copy "meaningful" mother's day cards, birthdays cards, wedding vows, speeches and whatnot from others. That was even a thing well before the internet itself.
Using LLMs for things people aren't passionate about and/or lack the experience of finding the right words is a great use case.
