Dear Google, who wants a fan letter written by AI?
When I first saw Google’s latest ad, I wondered, “Is this just happening to me, or is this bad?” By the fourth or fifth time I saw it, I stopped thinking.
It starts off innocently enough, with a father talking about how much his daughter loves Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (she “might even be the number one Sydney fan in the world”). Apparently, she wants to write a fan letter to the Olympic gold medalist and needs her dad’s help — and that’s where things take a turn.
Yes, this is an ad for Google’s Gemini AI, so the father inspires Gemini: “Help my daughter write a letter to Sydney telling her how inspiring she is and that my daughter plans to break her world record one day. (She says sorry, not sorry.)”
Now if you look carefully, you can see how this fits into the overall pitch for generative AI — it could be a writing coach or assistant, especially for someone who finds writing difficult or scary. And what could be scarier than writing a letter to your favorite athlete?
But it’s hard to think of anything that inspires so much heart Less Better than instructing an AI to tell someone how inspiring they are. Sure, Gemini is only creating a first draft that the father and his daughter will (hopefully?) personalize. But if this actually happened, Sydney would have a giant pile of nearly identical letters.
Novelist and Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast host Linda Holmes put it even more forcefully, writing, “Obviously there are special situations and people who need the help, but as a generic ‘Look how great it is, she didn’t have to write anything herself!’ story, it’s pretty lame. Who wants a fan letter written by an AI??”
Besides, as Holmes said, “A fan letter is a great way for a child to learn to write! If you encourage children to run to the AI to write words because their writing ability is still not good, how will they learn?”
I agree. Sadly, I will never be an Olympic athlete, but believe it or not, there are (extremely) rare occasions when tech bloggers get appreciation messages too. And I would love to. excess It’s better to receive a brief, human-written email that simply says “You’re great!!” than an in-depth form letter that was written by an AI.
None of this comes close to the level of Apple packing all of humanity’s achievements into an iPad, but it does suggest some of the challenges in introducing useful AI to ordinary people.
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