Script of my radio report yesterday regarding Google's horrible Gemini
AI ad from the Olympics
This is the script from my national radio report yesterday on Google's
horrible ad for Gemini AI during the Olympics. As usual, there may be
some very minor wording changes from how I presented this live on air.
- - -
So we know about the various ways that AI can be useful and the ways
in which it can be abused, and we know that the Big Tech AI companies
are really pushing generative AI on the public and attempting to get
us to use it for writing, for art, for pretty much anything they can
think of. And by and large, it's widely felt that generative AI at
this point mostly creates rather low quality content. I've been
calling it "The mediocrity machine", because so much of what this kind
of AI spews out is just so mind-numbingly mediocre.
But of course that doesn't stop these firms from pushing it because in
the long run there apparently seems to be a desire to have us all
dependent on their AI systems even if it causes our own creative
skills to atrophy or not develop in the first place.
Which brings us to this ad, this commercial that Google has run during
the current Olympics. And when I first saw it on YouTube (and by the
way, that video has its comments turned off by Google currently), I
was just flabbergasted at how awful it was. And since then this ad has
been quite effective at gathering criticism from pretty much all
segments of society around the world. It's being called perhaps the
worst Olympics ad ever, or even one of the worst TV ads of all time.
One media expert writing about it called it one of the most disturbing
commercials he'd ever seen. And basically it's managed overnight to be
one of the most despised commercials ever. Quite an achievement.
So what this ad does is show a young child who wants to write a fan
letter to an Olympic athlete they admire. So the father of this child
suggests that they use Google Gemini AI to write it for them! You may
have noticed that Google is pushing hard to let their AI do the
writing for users via text boxes all over the place now, often in ways
that one might reasonably expect might easily make people dependent on
those systems even for basic writing skills.
So anyway, the backlash, the blowback to this commercial has just been
enormous, because rather than highlight a good use case for generative
AI, it managed to shine a spotlight on so much that is so very wrong
with the way these firms are pushing out these systems. Because
obviously a child's fan letter is a perfect example of where you want
real feelings, heartfelt feelings, maybe with a little handmade
drawing however simple and straightforward these might be, even
assuming the dad needed to help. This is how children learn to write
and express themselves.
The last thing they need or for that matter that Olympic athletes need
to receive is sterile verbiage churned out by large language model AI
algorithms running in a computational cluster in a Google data center
somewhere.
There's so little real humanity in pushing AI that way that it's
almost like an AI wrote the entire commercial itself. Seriously,
what's also very telling is that apparently nobody in the creative
pipeline for bringing that commercial to air either tried or was
successful at saying "Hey, what is actually being promoted by this
spot? Is this really an approach that Google should emphasize this
way?"
And I think that this also highlights a deeper problem with Google and
other Big Tech firms as well -- they don't seem to have employees on
staff who are in positions to bring a wide variety of life experiences
to these kinds of decisions, or they don't have sufficient influence
within the companies to have any real impact.
Because it's really not rocket science to predict how an ad like this
one would most probably be received and how badly it would reflect on
Google more broadly.
If these firms keep pushing their AI systems in what most of society
may consider to be inappropriate ways, it's not going to be good for
these firms and it's definitely not going to be good for society. The
question is, will Big Tech learn from situations like this or just
keep on squeezing AI tech for every possible dollar no matter how
society feels about it? There's no way to know for sure of course, but
it pains me to say that for now at least, I'm not optimistic about
this at all.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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