You’re missing it! You’re missing all of it!

Let me tell you about the Gemini “Dear Sydney” ad. This ad for Google’s AI product is very bad.

This ad makes me want to throw a sledgehammer into the television every time I see it. Given the choice between watching this ad and watching the ad about how I need to be giving money NOW to make certain that dogs do not perish in the snow, I would have to think long and hard. It’s one of those ads that makes you think, perhaps evolution was a mistake and our ancestor should never have left the sea. This could be slight hyperbole but only slight!

If you haven’t seen this ad, you are leading a blessed existence and I wish to trade places with you. But I am about to recount it to you so that you can share in my misery, as anyone who has been watching the Olympics in any format now does.

The ad features a little girl who wants to write a letter to her idol, Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. So far, so good! The little girl’s dad wants to help her.

Advertisement

“I’m pretty good with words,” the girl’s dad says, “but this has to be just right.” So ... they will write it together? So ... he will let his daughter write it herself? No! So ... he asks Gemini AI to write the letter to Sydney on his daughter’s behalf — and be sure to tell Sydney “sorry, not sorry” that his daughter plans to break her records one day.

And the AI gamely does! (From the two or three lines of its output that you can glimpse in the course of the ad, you can see that the letter it writes is, candidly, garbage.)

Amazingly, this is an ad for the Gemini AI. Not an ad made by Google’s detractors in the hopes of getting us all to rise up with pitchforks and shut the whole thing down. Personally, I am not a big corporation, but I do not think that a good way of selling your product is to announce that it will suck all the joy out of being alive. I enjoy the joys of being alive. I don’t hate efficiency. But I hate missing the........

© Washington Post