Posted in: Olympics, Opinion, Sports, TV, TV, YouTube | Tagged: ai, artificial intelligence, google, olympics, opinion

Google Pulls "Dear Sydney" Olympics Ad After AI Backlash (VIDEO)

After backlash to the ad promoting the company's Gemini AI, Google announced that it was pulling "Dear Sydney" from the Olympics broadcast.

Remember when Apple dropped "Crush" earlier this year? To the tune of Sonny and Cher's "All I Ever Need Is You," the iPad Pro-pimping promo featured a large display of televisions, musical instruments, books, video game consoles, and more creative things being slowly crushed under a large hydraulic press (taking up over 50 seconds of the 1:08 ad). From there, the press rises to reveal that from that destruction comes a new iPad Pro… with AI. And then, Samsung tried to call them out – only for them to also get called out for promoting their own AI in the process. At a time when AI continues to fuel the justified fears that the creative community has about the human experience being replaced by machines, we're still not sure how anyone couldn't have seen the backlash coming. While the corporate side thinks of things in tech terms (and dollars & cents), a lot of folks who use the very things that were destroyed in that Apple commercial saw it as a cynical metaphor for the efforts being made to "automate art" – devaluing the importance of the artist in that process. Thankfully, Google got the message with its Olympics ad "Dear Sydney," right? Well…

During that 60-second ad (which you can check out above), we're treated to a touching voiceover of a father discussing his daughter's commitment to track – with the daughter looking to pen a letter to her idol, Olympic track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. But it's not long before Dad makes it clear that there is no way that either he or his daughter could pen the proper letter to McLaughlin-Levrone – not without Google's Gemini AI being there to "help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is and be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day." Does anyone want to guess what the online and media reactions were to it? Yup, not good. So much so that Google has pulled the ad from further Olympics airingas (though it's still available on YouTube).

"While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we've decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation," Google shared in a statement to Ad Age – a shift from the company's original position. "We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it. Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA. 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," read the company's original response to the ad.

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