Google says AI Olympics ad 'tested well' before inspiring outrage
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Even their response is so dystopian and out of touch. Completely misunderstanding what is wrong about this ad.
The problem is not with replacing creativity, problem is attempting to replace what should be a genuine, emotional interaction between a young aspiring human being to a person they look up as their role model.
The idea is here to create that connection, not automate it away as some sort of nuisance.
You can automate away all the appointment negotiations, business interactions and all that, but this is the one thing that should never be automated.
The outrage is justified because someone so out of touch is working on a tech that may influence our future by a lot. If they are so out of touch, how can they make any decisions that people would like.
Dehumanisation?
We are not sure of what we are supposed to do with LLMs beyond Advanced Auto-Complete, but we have engorged the stock value of several companies while we hope for a practical application beyond engorging stock values.
Using Advanced Auto-Complete to somehow help with education might be a good, practical application.
But one thing is clear: if a parent can't help a motivated child write a simple, sincere letter to a person who is training to compete on the WORLD STAGE, it's a sad statement about family and society.
That some corporate executives thought this scenario was appropriate for the Olympics shows that advertising monetisation will dehumanise us if we let it.
Perhaps the alternative was something like: "Motivated student writes letter to Nobel laureate scientist with the help of AI", or similar.
I can't imagine there's mass-scale relatable examples that are easy to come up with right now -- "programmer quickly instantiates test suite for existing codebase rapidly using AI" doesn't quite corroborate the "AI is more important than fire/electricity" hype coming from top leadership.
The hype machine for AI makes what we experienced with crypto look tame.
That's because the crypto bros didn't have tech giants on their side when they first started. It's not easy to create hype when you don't have unlimited marketing budget.
For example, Google's original Gemini launch had an ad where someone wanted to use AI to caption their dog photo for social media: https://youtu.be/b5Fh7TaTkEU?t=36s
There was an older ad for the Pixel camera app where it could use AI to "fix" a family photo where one of the kids was making a funny face, and instead give him a "JC Penny catalog photo"-approved smile.
At this point I wonder if they've just replaced their marketing team with AI itself, because I can't believe a human with actual emotional experience would have green-lit these ads.
Are they rethinking? Because their response seemed also completely out of touch.
Their response is:
"AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it."
They think it's about replacing creativity, and seem to be clueless that people are outraged about replacing genuine and rare human interaction.
The message from the girl to her role model doesn't even need to be creative, it just needs to be genuine - that's the only thing it needs to be!
At least, not today.
You end up seeing super-high production values on moronic product. How did the moron get to the top? He owns the place, or is a friend of the owner, and is answerable to no one.
Simply all who disagree will be eaten out, and "yes men" will be the only ones to stay.
I've worked in organizations where the worst possible thing you could do is not report something negative to your boss. Not reporting carries way worse consequences than the consequences of whatever the original problem is. In such organizations people aggressively forward bad news upward.
I've also worked in organizations where leadership does not want to hear anything bad. Their attitude is that the purpose of their underlings is to fix any problems and if any bad news percolates up to the top, then it's a failure of the people doing the reporting and they should be punished. Such organizations basically end up purging honest management and rewarding liars and yes men.
I could care less about this little clip. Personally I use AI to write letters to my elected officials, review the speech I had to write for the wedding I’m attending next week (and give me ideas for things I should have done differently like focus on the couples relationship instead of just stories I have with the groom), and help me write a children’s book for my daughter. All things I care about and I’m currently better for it and saved time. Say what you will
I can't write, so I use AI to generate a bunch of options and I pick from that. There's still a human element, but AI gets me through 90% of the grind.
as opposed to the groups that have strong opinions on AI use in the opposite direction. there's a difference from being a fan/proponent and being a full throated kool-aid drinking evangelist that says AI is the solution for any question. extremes always suck the oxygen out of the rooms
Bloody hell, I never even thought of this. Pity the modern politician, doomed to read an endless stream of machine-generated drivel.
And this is a fine strategy for most ads, where pop culture critics are not paying much attention. But critics have tech and AI specifically firmly in their sights these days, so you probably need to consider whether you want to cater to that audience, or whether you're just hoping they'll be getting annoyed at someone else at that time.
The problem is the testing itself. We see this in political polling, where the poll surveys come back very confidently stating x y and z people are n points ahead among demographics a b and c. The problem is that time after time again the pollsters are made out to be weathermen forcasting rain during a heatwave a snow during a drought with lots of gesticulation but no substance. Their methods were wrong, and they picked the safest modeling to use so that if they were wrong they would be only sort of wrong, until it got to be a pure flip of the coin as to if it would rain or not.
The polls and tests and all this "data driven" hogwash are not testing for truth in the market, they are testing for truth in how things test. And as software developers know - the real testing happens after QA.
Too many predictors and fortune tellers are trying to sell a nice thought with plywood beams holding it up. In the past it was hard to actually go and quantify how poorly the rest result matched up with reality, today it is a lot easier to see a failure after a poor showing - but somehow we are still eluded in the testing process.
Fire them all. Have google gemmini make a thousand ads and run them in a thousand places and then figure out which ones are hitting the mark after the fact. It would be cheaper than sitting around for months trying to synthesize the perfect ad in vitro just for it to be poorly received and the entire investment wasted.
Pollsters, focus testers, marketers, they all have this same problem of thinking their lab still can accurately quantify the external world. They can't, and I dont have a solution (i will never respond to a poll, even for money).
because that's their exact purpose. it's much better to get laughed at in a focus group than being laughed at by the general public. in the former it can be fixed where the latter means you're trying to save face. only Hollywood Don Drapers never have a stinker of an idea. testing teams with no spine to push back serve no real purpose.
No. No one likes that.
There's this huge misunderstanding that I see a lot on these AI prompting ads that people will want to use AI to write things they care about... Perhaps a sort of "I care so much about this that I'd like it to be perfect" when I believe, for people, when we care about something we want to put effort into it. Even if the result is flawed, the effort is what matters.
If I'm an athlete and I receive a handwritten letter from a little girl, and i can see the struggle in a simple "I want to be like you" that is so much more valuable than a 10 paragraph ai assisted essay.
This is so obvious? Obviously google is surrounded by yes men.
Now, if they showcased Gemini writing a good legal complaint to the Mayor detailing police about, that'll get them some black customers for sure.
Or they could show Gemini writing a reply to a HAO letter complaining about an untidy driveway, for that white suburbanite market.
One theory I heard from Robert Evans is that a lot of the tech bros (Altman, Musk, Andreeson, etc) have developed their vision of the future they're working towards from dystopian sci-fi. This is a hard sell because it's.. dystopian. So they feel the need to preclude any other possible vision of the future by drowning it out with machine-generated dreck.
I have another theory. My theory is this stuff doesn't really work for anything useful. Efforts to make AI drive cars or fold laundry have failed. But they have noticed that the randomness in the AI algorithms produces an effect that kinda feels like creativity so, you know, sell it to Hollywood.
But yes, they're being used as tools. They don't "replace" your creative output they augment it. It would be interesting if these companies actually collaborated with people that are doing cool things with these tools. But then again, they might think the AI is not placing an important enough role in the creation process. But, I mean, that's exactly what I think people would see as a plus.
For me, in this ad in particular, when it asked to come up with a training routine and such... that's good, that's helpful. Should have stayed with that.
The problem is that AI is a hammer so everything is a nail to them.
Writing a letter for your dying grandma is not really a chore. I think they are trying really hard to appeal to the common person but they misunderstand that all a common person doesn't really have a huge need of a lot of these things.
I mean, I use copilot and I like it. I even use image generation to get pictures to do collages with (before I would sometimes search for hours for the right image on magazine scans and so on).
But when I was leaving the place I lived for for years a few months ago, it didn't even cross my mind to use an LLM to write a letter for my friends. I would it, perhaps, to help me find specific words, synonyms, rhymes. That's something they're good at. But it's never a "just do this for me". Idk, I think they need to accept that this tech is just not the end-all-be-all of human writing.
Imo, an ad that simply shows someone asking the LLM for certain concepts, for word plays, for little things would play much better with the general population. I think Apple did some of that in their AI pitch.
Not really sure why you used any words after that as it is much more of an issue than just in writing. The cult vibes are off the charts
Not Google alone, and it's a demonstration of those corporations and the way they act and behave being detached from the real world, probably a result of unrestrained growth. I would say it's a vain and effortless attempt to promote their subpar product, but after the Gemini image generation scandal (the most notable recent example) and how there wasn't anyone in charge that could stop it from going live, it's more about a clearly delusional group of people persevering in ruining their companies' image, after all as long as revenue and profit margins go up, they surely can't be doing wrong.
I sense more that it is something where the "ick" factor is high, but people are generally terrible at writing and love the boost AI gives them.
On Google's side though, it just looks like "damn, people really like using this to write letters to others".
But even then, I find it astonishing that this tested well, and probably more evidence that the testing questions and methodology were bad than anything else.
and how do you know when you are or not?
There was also that dystopian Apple ad about technology crushing everything.
[0]: The rule of thumb is actually very simple. If it is made by big tech, and/or broadcast on TV, then it's good.
People don’t want AI to disintermediate their relationships with other humans. If I can’t trust the words you send are actually from you, then they become meaningless. If you used an AI to write something you probably didn’t really even read it, much less write it. How is that anything but an insult?
But it’s one thing when it’s between adults. But to take a kid of an utterly innocent age and pretend that it’d be good for the kid or meaningful in any way for the athlete to use AI in this way is just utterly sociopathic.
Edit: You guys don't have to downvote me for telling you all the unwelcome truth. Nobody actually thought they were broadcasting to Google's management, right?
The ad shows some person cutting you in traffic. Gemini (preferably Claude) pops up and "I see there's a nasty person in traffic who cut you off. Do you wish me to search the web for their contact information and write a roast letter to them?"