I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
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The logical extension of this stuff is insane -- why have kids learn to write at all? They can just have an AI do it. Why learn anything? It's all on the internet anyway.
There are plenty of good use cases for AI generated texts. Creating transcripts from audio, writing meeting summaries, and other types of rote, monotonous tasks. Writing a letter from the heart is not one of those things that should be outsourced.
If there's anything on this earth we should value, it's humanity. And the tech giants are chomping at the bit to take that away. It's a sad vision for the future they're pushing
What I find most intriguing is the fact that these are giant companies with huge ad budgets and that presumably clear the highest profile ads with the C suite or people near it. All these presumably smart people thought these ads were great. They either agreed with the message or wanted to convey a different one that absolutely did not come through… as any moron could have told them.
It shows how insulated the bubble is around these people and companies. They must never even interact with people who aren’t drinking the same brand of kool-aid.
It’s tempting to think this is just an elite mega corp thing but I see loads of out of touch bubbles around.
People need to mix more. Get out of whatever filter bubble you live in. Read things you disagree with. Know people outside your profession or who don’t think like you.
We used to say “travel” but I think intellectual and social diversity is more important now. We carry our filter bubbles with us. Travel can still help though, especially if it’s to places with differing dominant cultures.
I interpreted it as look at all these cool arts/creative things that we've managed to compress into a single sheet of glass. I sort of get how people interpreted it as just maliciously destroying those things as a means to an end, but that feels like an intentional reading of bad faith to a company that is generally very creativity-minded.
I wonder if it would have received less blow back if they had "hidden" the actual crushing of the objects and just showed them entering a chamber with an implied compression... but the visuals of everything exploding in the hydraulic press are pretty cool and a more dynamic way to convey the "look at what all we've packed into the product" message.
Yes. You just wrote a better ad than Apple's highly paid agency.
I don't think it was an intentional reading in bad faith at all. I think the reaction is a result of the general public's existing perception of the state of things: big tech is here to monetize and worsen everything you love.
Whether or not that's an accurate perception, it is a very common one. The tech industry seems to view itself as unalloyed "good guys", but that's not generally how it's viewed among normal people.
In my opinion, marketing relies on targeting people's initial guttural feelings. That's why car commercials always show the cool part of driving, to activate the monkey brain "ooo shiny!" mentality.
So, I think criticisms of how people feel are fair game. Meaning if someone doesn't have a logical argument that's fine to me - because marketing is emotional manipulation anyway, so if your emotions got manipulated wrongly then the marketing failed.
I imagine there was a conversation something along the lines of:
Google: "Please make us an ad showing off the cool capabilities of our LLM"
Ad agency: "OK, how about we show it boosting productivity in a business environment?"
G: "Sounds like job losses, that's not the vibe we want, got anything else?"
A: "I've heard this stuff has genius-level intellect, could we show it designing a more efficient turbine engine? And we could show the CAD drawing gradually appearing as the AI moves the cursor around?"
G: "Nah, it can't any of that stuff."
A: "What about if we show a home user letting the LLM taking care of boring drudgery, like writing a complaint letter to an inept credit rating agency?"
G: "Boring drudgery isn't the vibe we want in our ad either. Got any other ideas?"
A: "Well what sort of thing were you thinking of?"
G: "How about we show the product being used while enjoying quality time with their family? Smartphone ads always show people taking photographs of their laughing, smiling children."
A: "For real? Like that Apple VR headset ad that shows a dude wearing it while watching his daughters blowing bubbles?"
G: "Oh yeah we had a Google Glass ad showing a dude wearing it while playing with his daughters about a decade ago too! That's precisely the sort of thing we want."
Is Notepad okay or should one write it up on Papyrus like Herodotus did? Is email fine, or you reckon Ravens, like the good ol' days?
I was having this discussion with someone and they said the problem with tech is they’re just going to teach our kids to be prompt engineers and learn nothing else, and I naively defended the tech industry and said no, of course not, AI will be used to enhance people’s learning of traditional skills, not replace it, and boy does this ad make me feel wrong.
No. Most people definitely cannot.
Most people can't see through the weird diversity nuclear option on all large company marketing these days. "White, male, straight, most common denominator in many countries and YOU have the NERVE to think that we should market to you!?" It'd be hilarious if it weren't so weird to think that people are actively trying not to include the largest demographics.
If they were marketing it for the masses it'd be vastly different. Obviously they're marketing it for Western nations.
Also it makes people feel good when they're represented. White men won't admit that, because for them they're always represented. And when they're not its a problem, so clearly even they understand the power of representation.
And, lastly, if you LOOK you can see white people are still in almost every ad. They're just not the only people in the ad. This is a problem of greed, the white man does not settle for anything less than 100%.
Keep in mind I'm saying this as a white man. The world is truly made for us and our success. On the off-chance it's not this one time, we need to be okay with that and learn to get over it.
>White men won't admit that, because for them they're always represented.
No they aren't... what? People represented to the market before they represented for "moral dilemmas".
>And, lastly, if you LOOK you can see white people are still in almost every ad.
No, they aren't. That's the point of my comment. It's almost a meme that every company refuses to put a white straight male in advertised media.
>The world is truly made for us and our success.
You sound like you've taken a sip of the Koolaid. This entire comment is bizarre and wrong. I'm going to assume you also think cultural appropriation is an actual thing too?
Again, same with the ads. Ads typically have multiple people in them. Usually at least one is white, typically more or most are white. But as I've iterated, white people are greedy. Anything less than 100% may as well be 0% to the eyes of a lot of white people. That's been the theme since the inception of the US.
Or the Meta ad that muses "Write me a training plan to run a marathon." Because finding a training plan (a five minute internet search) is the hardest, limiting step of that endeavor! Not the months of dedication and will to stick to it.
What teachers actually do: address mental health blockers, help align resources where they're lacking at home, provide a positive environment that children can escape to, inspire children to want to learn, deal with any myriad of emergency issues that come up on a given day (e.g. how often does a coworker have a bathroom accident and need your help addressing it, in the middle of your presentation?)
I was honestly disappointed that Microsoft shut down Tay because they feared reputation damage. So yes, this was in my opinion good advertising, and a bad handling of the outcry from Microsoft's side.
I guess Microsoft wants to target a different audience ...
I don’t think that’s what they wanted.
I think the expression was created by publicists who, of course, want more publicity no matter what, because it makes them money.
I don’t think they like this brand. I think they want people talking about things that promote them.
That's what they say, but it isn't true. Business history is littered with counterexamples.
Thanks. How kind.
Petri gets at something much broader: what is the point of tech like Gemini that ostensibly makes some small parts of our lives more efficient when doing so robs them of what makes life worth living in the first place?
It is thinking in a form that you can share with other people.
As if ad companies were ever interested in having users who can think...
Webvan advertisement 1999:
Only Google could mess up such an easy ad concept of athletes and AI.
Barely related: I find it interesting the more I read about engineers refusal to allow their kids near tech, and how often their same companies use kids frequently in advertising.
Take-away quotation:
> All of the buffoons excited by the prospect of AI taking over all our writing — report summaries, data surveys, children’s letters, all tossed into the same pile indiscriminately — are missing the point in a spectacular manner. Do you know what writing is?
> It is thinking in a form that you can share with other people. It is a method for taking thoughts and images and stories out of your brain and putting them into someone else’s brain. E.M. Forster quotes a woman saying, “How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?” To take away the ability to write for yourself is to take away the ability to think for yourself.
She writes that as if this is a bad thing (from Google's point of view). Just think of how much more effective advertising will be!
But I don't agree with those quotes. Writing to other people is a way to communicate your ideas and feelings to them.
If you are unable to easily communicate those ideas and feelings, you can get someone, or some thing, to help you. The alternatives are to just send it and know it won't be understood, or struggle and hope it's understood.
That ad isn't asking for help with that, though. It's asking the AI to pretend to be his daughter and send a fan letter that means nothing. It isn't taking his daughter's thoughts and feelings and communicating them... It's just making everything up whole cloth, and even inventing a fake daughter for the guy to have that wants and does what he wants, instead of what she wants. It's disgusting.
Are any of us trying to be “efficient” when writing a fan letter? I wouldn’t think so. I want a suggestion on how to start.
If I asked an AI for the letter from the ad, I would also have read and edited it heavily before I considered it “complete.”
Maybe TFA author is correct that people need to hear what he’s saying (they won’t), but I for one will be using AI output as suggestions.
The entire sentiment and value of your AI-enhanced fan letter is contained in the prompt you fed the AI, because that's the part created by a human expressing their human feelings. All the rest is stochastic fluff. Why not just tweet the prompt to the athlete and call it a day?
"Sorry, I won't create content that encourages self-loathing, but you can always ask to be complimented."
Is Gemini still so 'safe' that it's unusable?
I’m not your mate, guy.
A fan letter from a child doesn't need to be correct in grammar or in spelling. On the other hand, it needs to talk about events that the child has experienced that the LLM will have no knowledge at all. So consider something like "I see you run on YouTube and my dad says that you run very fast. I want to be a runner just like you."
The experiences "see you run on YouTube" and "my dad says you run very fast" are crucial pieces of evidence that support the existence of that aspiration that the letter is meant to communicate, but the LLM has no knowledge of these experiences with the uninformative prompt shown in the ad.
I suppose that in the best case scenario, the LLM will give the prompter the feedback and reflection that I mentioned here, something like "think about why you want to write a fan letter, and what experiences led to that desire. These can help you write a good fan letter, and tell me about those experiences."
Ironically, the kind of reply the ad gave is the kind of reply you want if you want if you had to write vapid polite platitudes that you don't mean all the time, which perhaps reflects the milieu Google and the ad agency producing this operate in.
A student who got that as a writing assignment in school would! They are targeting all the people who have to write bullshit optimistic letters everywhere, like HR, managers writing encouragements, students writing assignments, teachers writing feedback, and so on.