I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
washingtonpost.com
I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
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Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
#2UnPayWalled: https://archive.ph/7OS2Q
Take-away quotation:
> All of the buffoons excited by the prospect of AI taking over all our writing — report summaries, data surveys, children’s letters, all tossed into the same pile indiscriminately — are missing the point in a spectacular manner. Do you know what writing is?
> It is thinking in a form that you can share with other people. It is a method for taking thoughts and images and stories out of your brain and putting them into someone else’s brain. E.M. Forster quotes a woman saying, “How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?” To take away the ability to write for yourself is to take away the ability to think for yourself.
Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
#3I’m not the most in touch person in the world but this ad felt super out of touch.
I was having this discussion with someone and they said the problem with tech is they’re just going to teach our kids to be prompt engineers and learn nothing else, and I naively defended the tech industry and said no, of course not, AI will be used to enhance people’s learning of traditional skills, not replace it, and boy does this ad make me feel wrong.
Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
#4UnPayWalled: https://archive.ph/7OS2Q Take-away quotation: > All of the buffoons excited by the prospect of AI taking over all our writing — report summaries, data surveys, children’s letters, all tossed into the same pile indiscriminately — are missing the point in a spectacular manner. Do you know what writing is? > It is thinking in a form that you can share with other people. It is a method for taking thoughts an…
> To take away the ability to write for yourself is to take away the ability to think for yourself.
She writes that as if this is a bad thing (from Google's point of view). Just think of how much more effective advertising will be!
Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
#5Maybe I'm becoming too cynical, but now even an op-ed complaining about an ad feels like it might actually itself be a submarine ad in disguise; a "false-flag" attack against your own side to stir the pot and get people thinking about your product. There's no such thing as bad publicity, as they say.
Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
#6I’m not the most in touch person in the world but this ad felt super out of touch. I was having this discussion with someone and they said the problem with tech is they’re just going to teach our kids to be prompt engineers and learn nothing else, and I naively defended the tech industry and said no, of course not, AI will be used to enhance people’s learning of traditional skills, not replace it, and boy does this a…
The ad is seen as so bad because its attempt to create some supposed "essential" use case is hilariously transparent. There's just a visceral disgust we have when we see things like these targeted at children. We know what they are. The takeaway from the ad is a step back and away from the idea that technology will make us better or improve our lives; Google comes across as crassly presenting something bad (or pointless at best) as some human good, when most people can see right through it as the worst kind of marketing, a new low point in 2 decades and change of tech companies insisting they're "changing the world" with some half-baked, MBA fuelled, ghoulish crap.
Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
#7A funny coincidence: the Bing AI internal codename was Sydney according to leaked system prompts. I'm sure Google didn't think about that at all, but one could turn it into a metaphor where Google is looking up to Microsoft/OpenAI with intent to eventually pass them.
Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
#8In trying to find a use case for AI, this ad actually sets up the worst possible scenario. All I can think of now is Sydney getting flooded with AI generated fan mail and trying to adjust spam filters.
Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
#9Yeah like the article hints at, I thought it was made by anti-AI folks due to it highlighting exactly the type of AI we don't need at all. Replacing the personal with the impersonal "perfect" spam.
Only Google could mess up such an easy ad concept of athletes and AI.
Barely related: I find it interesting the more I read about engineers refusal to allow their kids near tech, and how often their same companies use kids frequently in advertising.
Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment
#10Maybe I'm becoming too cynical, but now even an op-ed complaining about an ad feels like it might actually itself be a submarine ad in disguise; a "false-flag" attack against your own side to stir the pot and get people thinking about your product. There's no such thing as bad publicity, as they say.
> There's no such thing as bad publicity, as they say.
That's what they say, but it isn't true. Business history is littered with counterexamples.