If you’ve spent time watching the Olympics on NBC or Peacock over the past two weeks, you’ve almost certainly seen them: schmaltzy ads for new AI tools from the world’s largest corporations. From Google’s Gemini to Microsoft’s Copilot and Meta AI, artificial intelligence is inevitable at the Summer Games, an event ostensibly to showcase the best of human power.
Meta’s Begins with a sad lady on a couch asking the AI how to prepare for a marathon. inside Microsoft’s, a pregnant woman asks the copilot to write an email about weight training (are we sensing a theme here?), while a father asks it to shorten his morning calls so he has more time to help his son with boxing practice. Uplifting music and vaguely inspirational taglines — “expand your world” and “you, empowered,” respectively — are meant to show how using AI can act as a personal assistant, giving users more time to spend on things that matter. . As far as Olympic-themed ad campaigns for tech giants go, this is pretty standard stuff.
This was not the case Google’s “Dear Sydney” ad, which centers on a father whose daughter is an aspiring track star and superfan of American Olympic hurdler Sidney McLaughlin-Levron. The daughter, we learn, wants to write McLaughlin-Levron a letter to tell her how much he means to her. But in a surprising move, the dad then decided to ask Google’s Gemini to brainstorm one for him, turning what could have been a heartwarming father-daughter bonding moment into an opportunity to create a chatbot version of a fan letter.
To say it wasn’t a hit would be an understatement. The By Alexandra Petri of The Washington Post that the commercial “makes me want to throw a sledgehammer into it every time I watch television” and that it was “an ad that makes you think, maybe evolution was a mistake.” “Is their pitch really, ‘Hey, we can feel and express emotions so your daughter doesn’t have to’?” asked the sports writer Shehan Zeyerjah on. Tech consultant Shelley Palmer, who advises companies on AI, who wrote “‘Dear Sydney’ was “one of the most boring commercials I’ve ever seen.”
After shutting down the comment section on its YouTube page, Google finally pulls ads From NBCUniversal’s coverage, wrote in a statement to Variety that “We believe that AI can be a great tool to enhance human creativity, but it can never replace it. Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA.”
This isn’t the first marketing blunder by a tech company in recent months. This May, Apple published an ad To promote his new iPad where a hydraulic press literally crushes physical objects used in creative practice: a piano, paint bucket, a book, a drum set and camera, nothing remains but a single iPad. As Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto to identify At the time, “the message many of us got was this: Apple, a trillion-dollar behemoth, will crush everything beautiful and human, pleasing to the eye and touch, and all that will be left is a skinny slab of glass and metal.”
It wasn’t a great look, considering the widespread apprehension about how technology like AI, which Apple owns Invested heavily, will replace jobs and worsen existing ones. Marketing strategies that boast AI’s ability to render meaningful actions — like, say, drawing or writing a letter to your daughter — are worth little more than a single button-click to a demographic that’s already anxious. The future of technology. According to a 2023 Pew study, 52 percent are American said they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in their daily lives.
While its boosters have claimed for the past two years that artificial intelligence will soon be creativity’s “great counterpart,” turning average Joes into artistic geniuses and offering all the benefits of a personal assistant at the push of a button, signs of late are that AI is a bubble that might burst. On the verge of bursting. Stock market losses this week were led by tech companies that were bullish on AI, such as chipmaker Nvidia and Amazon. partly due to The extraordinarily high cost of running an AI model (it approx (that OpenAI costs $700,000 a day to run ChatGPT, and the more it’s used, the more it costs) and the economic reality that at some point the bills will have to be paid.
The ad’s tone recalls crypto, Web3, and the ubiquitous metaverse during the 2022 Super Bowl, creating a cadre of celebrities to shill unregulated currencies for the likes of FTX, Coinbase, and Crypto.com. Both have heralded their respective technologies as the next great innovation that will make humans hyper-productive (in the case of AI) and prosperous (both). Since then, crypto has been completely absent from the 2023 and 2024 Super Bowls, after crypto prices plummeted and all three companies either went bankrupt or were embroiled in scandal. Even in 2022, people criticized the ads for their tone-deafness and blatant deception: They “feel like Pets.com all over again,” Wired PerCiting the infamous tech bubble of the 2000s.
Much like crypto, AI tools powered by tech companies today are environmental disasters, consuming as much energy as entire countries This is expected to double by 2026, and includes Millions of gallons of water Equipment is required for cooling.
These environmental and ethical dilemmas didn’t stop NBC and the International Olympic Committee from wholeheartedly embracing AI, even as the Paris Games were promised. “Most durable” ever held. Some of NBC’s coverage Uses An AI version of 79-year-old sportscaster Al Michaels’ voice, while the IOC launched an Intel-powered chatbot where athletes can ask questions about procedures and schedules. fate note The IOC found 180 use cases for AI in the Olympics, but found they were largely “nothing more than marketing ploys.” But others, particularly the technology used to track the movements of audience members in crowds, raise serious questions about what role we expect AI to play in increased surveillance.
What you’ll see on television, though, are expensive, slickly produced commercials in which a woman motivates herself to train for a marathon or A guy gets really excited An AI-generated image sets the word “kersploosh” to Jay-Z’s “public service announcement.” You will see lots of sparkling emojis, Now an industry-wide symbol AI represents what compares technology to magic (even Never ask for sparkles though Be part of this!) You will see Leslie Jones asks Gemini To design a gymnastics routine for her and the tagline about how AI is a superpower in the palm of your hand.
The AI industry has bigger problems than a single poorly executed Google ad. It is facing existential questions about the product’s effectiveness and practicality and whether it under-delivers on its promises. The latest spot of AI advertising campaigns, for their part, has so far failed to highlight how its products help. The majority of Americans actually want to use AI — e.g., help with housework — and instead show how AI can be used for those things no Want to interfere with: our work possibilities, our privacy and experiences and skills that feel uniquely human. If the world already thinks of AI as scary, wasteful and another example of market overhype, these ads are just confirming our worst fears. No wonder they come off as so helpless.
