Google's Olympics ad went viral for all the wrong reasons | Hacker News Reader

Google's Olympics ad went viral for all the wrong reasons

cnn.com

30 pointsbelter26 comments

So glad to see this. Google's Gemini advertising is insane. A couple months ago when Gemini first launched they had an ad using Gemini to caption someone's dog photo for social media. In my opinion it was just plain gross - like our lives have become so performative we can't even use our own brains to caption our own photos of our pets for friends and family??? It also shows how clueless and "tech bubble isolated" Google's marketing has become.

Well I’d absolutely love to see AI tools to add alt text to images since people can’t seem to be bothered to do it manually. But I assume you mean the post text that comes with the image which, yeah normally people want to have a personal message there!

I do use alt text but really I think this should be a client-side function. Also i've noticed that a lot of alt text captions are dreadful, absurdly over-written blocks of text that make me wonder if the person is a frustrated novelist. With client-side approach, people could choose whether they want terse or verbose image descriptions as needed.

Here is specifically what I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Fh7TaTkEU&t=36s

It's comical to watch Big Tech whiff advertising, even though they have big budgets. There's one simple question they often fail to answer:

What problem is this product or service solving?

A child writing a letter to their sports hero is not that problem.

The problem that they are trying to solve is how to sell more. We should probably think more about how to teach consumers to ask if they really need or want that thing.

The GenAI products from big tech increasingly seem to be solutions looking for problems to solve.

Right? I'm not looking for AI to write music and poetry for me. What I need is for something to consume all the notes I've taken in OneNote and allow me to ask questions. You'd think someone like Microsoft would be able to pull that off?

Likewise with Google. If you're using Google Docs then why can't you query the data using NLP? Then show me the documents that led you to the answer.

Bottom line: we need modern ways of managing information.

I have seen parts of this ad come up on YouTube and every time I see it I wonder how they thought it was a good idea.

There are so many other use cases they could have chosen but instead they went with, instead of a genuine letter lets make something fake from his daughter to a random person.

Like, with all the fears about AI replacing humans, why would you go for replacing emotional connection?

Edit:

Compare it to the Meta ones. Focusing on actually asking it questions or doing things like making a workout routine. Which while still problematic from a reliability standpoint, at least it's not literally leaning into AI removing the human component.

Google seems to operate in a giant tech bubble. It's wild how out of touch their advertising and products can be. There was a thread recently about how Google Maps works decently well in any scenario that you would expect a stereotypical Google employee to use it in, but is terrible outside of those cases.

Outsourcing genuine human interactions to AI is abhorrent to most people, but I'm sure it appeals to a certain type of tech maximalist at Google.

I saw the add, father encourages daughter to write letter to hero Olympic sprinter Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone using AI. I thought it was a bit strange but not much more strange than a car company privatizing cars by showing people driving recklessly (the commercials even have disclaimers in little letter at the bottom of the screen). I wondered if Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone would just us AI to write back.

Those car ads are at least showing something that car lovers fantasize about doing.

Who is fantasizing about automating personal and special correspondence? Particularly children.

Bad advertising aside, I can't shake the feeling we're teaching the next generation that writing even a short letter is just too hard.

And if they never practice, it absolutely will be.

When I saw the ad with several people everyone was just confused. Part of the issue is Google doesn't have as much experience with advertising their products. Just like with the Apple ad it shows a certain disconnect with the complex ways tech is viewed from outside tech. There's also the solution looking for problem issue especially on the consumer facing side. There's many benefits to AI but they're much more niche and not as 'hip' to a wide audience.

> Part of the issue is Google doesn't have as much experience with advertising.

Google has been engaging in TV/radio/print advertising for itself for a long time, and its core business is advertising.

But regardless of that, Google certainly hired an agency that does have experience advertising. Or so I'd assume.

> “It showcases a real-life track enthusiast and her father, and aims to show how the Gemini app can provide a starting point, thought starter, or early draft for someone looking for ideas for their writing.”

Hint: developing the thoughts and early draft is the enriching and creative part of the process.

But I hope this guy's daughter will be happy with her minimum wage future of sanity checking LLM output.

Once AI has replicated and replaced all human based thinking, creativity and task, etc, then what should we do with the humans? If something no longer serves its original purpose, why keep it around?

I wonder if AI will eventually collect humans and put them on shelves on display, similar to what we do with video games, old Apple Mac computers, etc.

> Once AI has replicated and replaced all human based thinking, creativity and task, etc

This will never happen.

True, but that's the goal those companies are shooting for.

So what? There's no point worrying, or even commenting, about something that will never happen. Or is there any chance?

I have exactly zero worries about it happening, but that the companies are pushing for it makes be worry a lot about what those companies are willing to do generally.

Next up: when our LLM can write letters for your kid, why even have a kid! You can just have an AI kid! No more keeping a dog and calling it your child, now you can have a kid without the difficulty of having a kid!

And kids! Why even have parents! You can just have AI parents!

That Spielberg AI movie (and the story it's based on, 'Supertoys last all summer long' by Brian Aldiss) has aged better than many expected at the time.

> The ad inspired dozens of posts on Threads, X, LinkedIn and elsewhere, where many people who watched it were asking: Why would anyone want to replace a child’s creativity and authentic expression with words written by a computer?

As noted in the article, it's another example of tech companies being disconnected. Reminds me of Apple's ad that destroyed an iPad (which is beautiful played in reverse).

I have a swag T-shirt that has on the front "Living the dream." and on the back "#humanity" and a Honcho (kitchen knife) emoji. The execs thought it was a cute idea, because their mental model/context at the time was about trimming unnecessary aspects of the product to 'delight users'. Needless to say, the employees got as many of these undistributed shirts as they wanted. I keep one around as a reminder of 'tone-deafness'.

https://archive.ph/yIrrd

Meh. This looks like some kind of knee jerk reaction.

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