Another tech giant has to pull a pro-AI ad after public backlash

Google’s Dear Sydney ad has been all over the US Olympic coverage. Or at least it was, as the company has now pulled it after a very public backlash.

If you haven’t seen the Dear Sydney ad, you can watch it below. If you already have — and possibly countless, countless times given the amount of airtime Google booked for it — you are more than welcome to skip the pain of ever watching it again.

Happily, no one will see it any more because Google has pulled it.

“While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we have decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation,” a Google spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter. For which a grateful nation just says “Thank you.”

So, just to recap, the reason that the ad is titled Dear Sydney is because it’s about a young girl’s quest to write a letter to American track and field star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. It’s narrated by her father who states, “I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right,” before then prompting Google Gemini to help her write the letter.

Yes, that’s right. Asking an AI to write a child’s fan letter to her heroine. The comments section of the internet has been less than impressed at this mechanisation, automation, and essentially dehumanisation of what is one of the defining moments of childhood for many. Yes, as adults we know that famous people tend to have teams that look after these things when they wrote a response. But the fact that teams of children could be asking AIs to craft the perfect mix of starstruck awe and childish enthusiasm in the first place has been a step too far.

“This ad makes me want to throw a sledgehammer into the television every time I see it,” wrote The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri, consciously or subconsciously referencing Apple's famous 1984 ad where the individual sought to triumph over the soulless machine, not the other way round.

Google Wins the Gold Medal for Worst Olympic Ad, ran the headline in The Atlantic. “The whole thing is bleak," it wrote. "The company may make bold claims about AI’s capabilities to radically advance civilization. But it can’t escape the reality that it’s co-opting the hopeful aesthetics of the Olympics, which are meant to celebrate human accomplishments, in order to promote a digital technology that can be used to undermine human labor.”

Again, a Big Tech company has misread the room. Apple had to pull its woeful Crush ad in May after the public decided that its underlying message was one of the destruction of human creativity rather than the enabling of it, and now Google has made a similar mistake. Investors and Wall St might love AI (and Tim Cook spent a lot of last week’s most recent Apple earnings call earnestly enthusing about it), but there’s a definite disconnect between the view of Artificial Intelligence at boardroom level and that out and about in the real world. And it’s not a perception gap that looks to be shrinking any time soon.

tl;dr

• Google's Dear Sydney ad, featuring a young girl writing a letter to a track and field star with the help of an AI, sparked a backlash and has been pulled from TV.
• The ad faced criticism for mechanizing and dehumanizing a personal and heartfelt experience for children by involving AI in the writing process.
• The bottom half of the internet is unimpressed, accusing Google of promoting a world where personal interactions are mediated by computers.
• The backlash against the ad reflects public skepticism and discomfort with the increasing presence and influence of AI and technology in human experiences.