Virtually three months after Apple apologized for its Crush! ad and pulled it from TV, Google is doing the identical for its Dear Sydney Olympics industrial.
In Google’s July 26 industrial, the advert exhibits a father describing how a lot his younger daughter admires U.S. Olympic hurdler, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. He makes use of Google’s AI overviews to reply “how you can educate hurdle method” and Google’s Gemini AI to write down a fan letter on his daughter’s behalf utilizing the immediate: “Assist my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is and make sure to point out that my daughter plans on breaking her world file at some point. (She says sorry, not sorry).”
Gemini got here up with a draft letter and the advert ends there. On Friday, nonetheless, Google pulled the advert, which performed throughout advert breaks from the Olympics, after per week of pushback from viewers.
A Google spokesperson instructed The Hollywood Reporter Friday, “Whereas the advert examined effectively earlier than airing, given the suggestions, now we have determined to part the advert out of our Olympics rotation.”
Shelly Palmer, professor of superior media in residence at Syracuse College’s S.I. Newhouse College of Public Communications wrote in a July 28 weblog publish that the advert is “probably the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.”
“I flatly reject the long run that Google is promoting,” he wrote. “I need to reside in a culturally various world the place billions of people use AI to amplify their human expertise, not in a world the place we’re utilized by AI pretending to be human.”
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The media additionally bashed the advert.
TechCrunch noted that if the advert occurred in actuality, McLaughlin-Levrone would have acquired a pile of letters that sounded the identical.
NPR popular culture correspondent Linda Holmes requested “Who needs an AI-written fan letter?” on social media. The Washington Publish‘s Alexandra Petri said the advert made her need to “throw a sledgehammer into the tv” when she noticed it.