A new Google ad promoting its AI capabilities is facing significant backlash. The TV advertisement, aired during the Olympics, shows a father talking about his daughter’s admiration for American Olympic track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The ad features the young girl training with tips from Google’s AI search feature. The dad then asks Google’s Gemini chatbot to generate a letter from his daughter to McLaughlin, mentioning that the girl plans to break her hero’s world record.
The ad aims to highlight Google AI’s ability to create human-like text, useful for writing emails or planning trips. However, many online critics view it as another instance of Big Tech being out of touch with reality. The ad sparked numerous posts on Threads, X, LinkedIn, and other platforms, questioning why anyone would replace a child’s genuine creativity with computer-generated words.
“It’s a striking miss for the tech giant,” said one user on Threads, calling the ad “just mortifying.” Another post on X by Will Leitch, founder of sports blog Deadspin, echoed this sentiment. “The Google commercial where the dad has his daughter use AI to construct a note to her favorite athlete rather than encourage her to write what she actually wants to tell her hero takes a little chunk out of my soul every time I see it,” Leitch wrote. His post was reposted more than 3,000 times.
The backlash underscores broader concerns about AI technology as it becomes more integrated into everyday life. While tech companies claim AI will simplify tasks like grocery shopping, coding, or translation, many early AI tools seem to replace human creativity in art, music, and storytelling.
Creatives, including musicians and visual artists, have raised alarms about AI replacing them. This issue was central to last year’s Hollywood writers’ strike, and some have sued tech firms over alleged misuse of their copyrighted works to train AI models. Despite criticism, tech firms continue to develop AI tools that create new emojis, speak, and generate videos.
“I flatly reject the future that Google is advertising,” said Shelly Palmer, a professor at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “I want to live in a culturally diverse world where billions of individuals use AI to amplify their human skills, not in a world where we are used by AI pretending to be human.”
Apple faced similar backlash earlier this year with an ad showing symbols of human creativity being crushed by a hydraulic press and replaced by an iPad Pro. Apple quickly apologized for “missing the mark” with the advertisement.
