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I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment

washingtonpost.com

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Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment

#51

Post by kjsingh »

ignoramous wrote: post #47
capital_guy wrote: post #18

I've seen this ad a hundred times during the Olympics so far (why do they play the same ads over and over?) -- and this article summarizes how it makes me feel very well. The logical extension of this stuff is insane -- why have kids learn to write at all? They can just have an AI do it. Why learn anything? It's all on the internet anyway. There are plenty of good use cases for AI generated texts. Creating transcript…

> Writing a letter from the heart is not one of those things... Is Notepad okay or should one write it up on Papyrus like Herodotus did? Is email fine, or you reckon Ravens, like the good ol' days?

we are talking about content and you are after the medium :)

Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment

#53

Post by ethbr1 »

techostritch wrote: post #3

I’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 Google Gemini "Allow me to reintroduce myself" ad is also hilarious. As in, right, re- introduce yourself... because the initial launch was such a hamfisted clusterfuck.

Or the Meta ad that muses "Write me a training plan to run a marathon." Because finding a training plan (a five minute internet search) is the hardest, limiting step of that endeavor! Not the months of dedication and will to stick to it.

Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment

#54

Post by stavros »

ignoramous wrote: post #47
capital_guy wrote: post #18

I've seen this ad a hundred times during the Olympics so far (why do they play the same ads over and over?) -- and this article summarizes how it makes me feel very well. The logical extension of this stuff is insane -- why have kids learn to write at all? They can just have an AI do it. Why learn anything? It's all on the internet anyway. There are plenty of good use cases for AI generated texts. Creating transcript…

> Writing a letter from the heart is not one of those things... Is Notepad okay or should one write it up on Papyrus like Herodotus did? Is email fine, or you reckon Ravens, like the good ol' days?

That's some good snark. I wonder if Gemini could produce that.

Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment

#55

Post by jhanschoo »

How doubly ironic: marketing professionals failing to appropriately locate and communicate the value of their product, and doing so by telling a story about a family failing to appropriately locate the value of a fan letter that is meant to communicate a child's adoration.

Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment

#56

Post by xg15 »

fzzzy wrote: post #33
xg15 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, by that logic MS couldn't have done better with Tay a few years ago. People were definitely talking about that one...

Sorry to make you feel old, but Tay was over 8 years ago.

Dang, really thought it was less than that...

Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment

#57

Post by michaelt »

api wrote: post #26
capital_guy wrote: post #18

I've seen this ad a hundred times during the Olympics so far (why do they play the same ads over and over?) -- and this article summarizes how it makes me feel very well. The logical extension of this stuff is insane -- why have kids learn to write at all? They can just have an AI do it. Why learn anything? It's all on the internet anyway. There are plenty of good use cases for AI generated texts. Creating transcript…

This and that awful Apple ad are both saying the same thing, or at least that’s how people interpret it. They’re saying “AI is here to make life sterile and empty and it’s awesome!” What I find most intriguing is the fact that these are giant companies with huge ad budgets and that presumably clear the highest profile ads with the C suite or people near it. All these presumably smart people thought these ads were gre…

> All these presumably smart people thought these ads were great. They either agreed with the message or wanted to convey a different one that absolutely did not come through… as any moron could have told them.

I imagine there was a conversation something along the lines of:

Google: "Please make us an ad showing off the cool capabilities of our LLM"

Ad agency: "OK, how about we show it boosting productivity in a business environment?"

G: "Sounds like job losses, that's not the vibe we want, got anything else?"

A: "I've heard this stuff has genius-level intellect, could we show it designing a more efficient turbine engine? And we could show the CAD drawing gradually appearing as the AI moves the cursor around?"

G: "Nah, it can't any of that stuff."

A: "What about if we show a home user letting the LLM taking care of boring drudgery, like writing a complaint letter to an inept credit rating agency?"

G: "Boring drudgery isn't the vibe we want in our ad either. Got any other ideas?"

A: "Well what sort of thing were you thinking of?"

G: "How about we show the product being used while enjoying quality time with their family? Smartphone ads always show people taking photographs of their laughing, smiling children."

A: "For real? Like that Apple VR headset ad that shows a dude wearing it while watching his daughters blowing bubbles?"

G: "Oh yeah we had a Google Glass ad showing a dude wearing it while playing with his daughters about a decade ago too! That's precisely the sort of thing we want."

Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment

#59

Post by jhanschoo »

cgijoe wrote: post #11

Remember the point of an ad. It's to be memorable, and to get people talking about it. Google wants people talking about Gemini. Well, here we are. I think Google won in this instance. But yes, the ad content is very bad.

I feel like there is a material difference when the conversation is about how your product is so hostile that they want to regulate it out of existence.

Re: I hate the Gemini 'Dear Sydney' ad more every passing moment

#60

Post by jhanschoo »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #12

> I don’t hate efficiency. Are any of us trying to be “efficient” when writing a fan letter? I wouldn’t think so. I want a suggestion on how to start. If I asked an AI for the letter from the ad, I would also have read and edited it heavily before I considered it “complete.” Maybe TFA author is correct that people need to hear what he’s saying (they won’t), but I for one will be using AI output as suggestions.

Give it a little thought. For a child's fan letter, the kind of suggestion that the LLM gave was still not useful at all, especially as a suggestion on how to start.

A fan letter from a child doesn't need to be correct in grammar or in spelling. On the other hand, it needs to talk about events that the child has experienced that the LLM will have no knowledge at all. So consider something like "I see you run on YouTube and my dad says that you run very fast. I want to be a runner just like you."

The experiences "see you run on YouTube" and "my dad says you run very fast" are crucial pieces of evidence that support the existence of that aspiration that the letter is meant to communicate, but the LLM has no knowledge of these experiences with the uninformative prompt shown in the ad.

I suppose that in the best case scenario, the LLM will give the prompter the feedback and reflection that I mentioned here, something like "think about why you want to write a fan letter, and what experiences led to that desire. These can help you write a good fan letter, and tell me about those experiences."

Ironically, the kind of reply the ad gave is the kind of reply you want if you want if you had to write vapid polite platitudes that you don't mean all the time, which perhaps reflects the milieu Google and the ad agency producing this operate in.

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