If the AI boom is dead, this commercial should be its epitaph.

A little girl uses AI to write to her hero and the tech stonks immediately tank.

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Last week I saw a commercial so bad I wondered if I had hallucinated it. Like I’d eaten something with and psychedelic mold and conjured my own perfect straw man.

The ad, called “Dear Sydney,” mixes glowing golden hour photography and tinkling pianos to create a classic “nostalgic flashback effect.” Home movie footage of kids + sunsets + piano music truly does an incredible job tricking your brain into thinking you’re watching something affecting and heartfelt. Great storytelling, for nefarious purposes.

The little girl in the commercial, we gather through the footage, a sort of montage of her growing up, is an aspiring hurdler who has come to idolize real-life Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. Cute, right?? We see the girl and her father Googling hurdling tips, and using Google’s easy-to-read, AI-created summaries of those tips and applying them to the girl’s training.

This is the same process, if you’ll remember, that for a time had Google’s AI recommending glue to hold the toppings on pizza. This thanks to the AI having scraped a joke post on Reddit by someone called “Fucksmith.” Leading to the headline I will never stop re-typing, “Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue.”

We don’t need to rehash the entire thing here again, but in essence, Google has bet big on the idea that what we want from a large language model is for it to read our Google search results for us and synthesize them into simple prose (which it currently does very poorly). It essentially hides the actual sites that provided this information, because fuck them, I guess.

But sure, an ad that paints a product as more useful than it actually is. What’s new about that? Well, that’s not the part of that ad that caused my soul to wither. That was the ad’s next bit, which turned out to be the climax, when the girl’s father, the ad’s narrator intones:

“Now she wants to show Sydney some love. And I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right. So, Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is.”

Gemini is the name of Google’s AI product. And so yes, this is an ad that suggests that a good use-case for its AI is for a little girl to have the AI write a letter to her hero for her. Actually, it’s even worse than that. It actually begins with the premise that the father would write the letter to his daughter’s hero for her. And then it gets grosser from therem as he eventually outsources it to the magic robot. All of the golden hour photography and all of the tinkling pianos on Earth couldn’t make that not seem like the dreariest fucking conception of a glorious future anyone has ever had. My God.

Back in March, a sci-fi writer named Joanna Maciejewska went viral for a tweet that seemed to sum up so many people’s feelings about AI so succinctly. She wrote in part, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

Obviously I’m somewhat biased as someone who writes about art for a living (ish), but I saw engineers, nurses, ag and construction workers etc. repost this one. It had clearly struck a nerve.

And now here was a commercial suggesting essentially the exact opposite, that we should outsource to AI, of all things, writing heartfelt letters to our heroes. Never has an ad so perfectly told on itself, that the people who conceived of this see writing earnest letters as a kind of superfluous busy owrk. It seemed to sum up everything that’s wrong with the efficiency-at-all-costs mindset of most of the people currently running the tech industry.

Hey, you know that edifying feeling you get when you muster the introspection required to tell someone how much they mean to you? What a waste of time, am I right!!!

To quote our friend Alice Fraser on the Frotcast, “If you optimize every quadrant of your life sufficiently well, then you could slide frictionlessly to the grave, never having to have any kind of experience.”

The idea in the ad is also yet another weird twist on Her, Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie about Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with his Siri, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. OpenAI actually tried to use Scarlett Johansson’s voice for their chatbot, presumably to try to remind people of Her, and got sued for it.

If you’ll remember, the opening scene in that film was Joaquin Phoenix’s character sitting in his cubicle, dictating letters, which turn out to be something he does as part of his job at BeautifulHandWrittenLetters.com.

This was meant to be a dystopia, a reason for Phoenix’s character to feel unfulfilled — having learned eloquent ways to express all these feelings he himself so rarely feels. And yet, an office drone writing letters to your grandma seems almost cute compared to having an AI bot compose your daughter’s letter to her idol.

Depressed yet??

Don’t be, because this story actually has a silver lining kind of. It turns out, so many people reacted to Google’s Gemini ad the same way I did that Google caved and pulled the ad after barely a week in rotation.

Google has pulled a commercial for its Gemini AI system from coverage of the 2024 Paris Olympics after the spot sparked backlash online.

“While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we have decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation,” a Google spokesperson tells The Hollywood Reporter.

It tested well? With who? I want addresses.

It’s certainly a low bar, but someone at Google actually realizing how soul-destroying and terrible this ad was does feel like some kind of progress. Was the ad getting pulled just a great use-case for the power of shame? Or possibly a signal of something more?

As Ryan Broderick wrote on Garbage Day yesterday:

The stock market is not doing so hot. CNBC is arguing this is all connected to a bad jobs report that dropped last week, but many of the stocks doing the worst right now are Big Tech stocks. At least tech writer Ed Zitron is having a good morning as his predictions of a tech bubble bursting come clearer into focus.

Indeed, Zitron (yes, a Frotcast guest, but don’t hold that against him) has been pointing to signs of the AI bubble deflating for months now. The tech companies have all made huge bets on AI products, and, at least anecdotally, no one seems to want what they’re selling. So far, the only real uses they’ve found for it are jokes and novelty videos, and no one really wants to entrust it with important stuff. And worse, getting it to scale enough to justify all the investment would require a massive leap forward in energy technology that currently doesn’t exist (“AI could gobble up a quarter of all electricity in the U.S. by 2030.” -Fortune).

All along, this endeavor has felt like the tail trying to wag the dog; companies forcing updates on the public no one actually wants, in order to justify their earlier bad assumptions about where things were going. The tech industry has come to prize prognostication over all else (ask yourself: how many times you’ve heard some founder called “a visionary”) to the point that a lot of its drivers are entirely make-believe. And sometimes they get off and running on an idea long before they realize it isn’t very good. (See: Theranos, or the umpteen predictions that we’d all be riding in autonomous vehicles by now). Then we just sort of have to live with their bad design decisions until it gets too onerous for them to continue on as usual (we’re probably going to have to wait a lot longer for companies to ditch the useless chatbots they’re already using for customer support).

Maybe this is a true inflection point or maybe it’s just a hiccup. But if the AI bubble is truly burst, this commercial is going to feel like the point when the general public finally spoke with a unified voice, and said, loudly and clearly, “Nah, fuck this.”