If you’ve watched any Olympics coverage this week, you’ve likely been confronted with an ad for Google’s Gemini AI called “Dear Sydney.” In it, a proud father seeks help writing a letter on behalf of his daughter, who is an aspiring runner and superfan of world-record-holding hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
“I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right,” the father intones before asking Gemini to “Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is…” Gemini dutifully responds with a draft letter in which the LLM tells the runner, on behalf of the daughter, that she wants to be “just like you.”
I think the most offensive thing about the ad is what it implies about the kinds of human tasks Google sees AI replacing. Rather than using LLMs to automate tedious busywork or difficult research questions, “Dear Sydney” presents a world where Gemini can help us offload a heartwarming shared moment of connection with our children.
Inserting Gemini into a child’s heartfelt request for parental help makes it seem like the parent in question is offloading their responsibilities to a computer in the coldest, most sterile way possible. More than that, it comes across as an attempt to avoid an opportunity to bond with a child over a shared interest in a creative way.
This is one of the weirdest of several weird things about the people who are marketing AI right now
I went to ChatGPT right now and one of the auto prompts it has is “Message to comfort a friend”
If I was in some sort of distress and someone sent me a comforting message and I later found out they had ChatGPT write the message for them I think I would abandon the friendship as a pointless endeavor
What world do these people live in where they’re like “I wish AI would write meaningful messages to my friends for me, so I didn’t have to”
The thing they’re trying to market is a lot of people genuinely don’t know what to say at certain times. Instead of replacing an emotional activity, its meant to be used when you literally can’t do it but need to.
Obviously that’s not the way it should go, but it is an actual problem they’re trying to talk to. I had a friend feel real down in high school because his parents didn’t attend an award ceremony, and I couldn’t help cause I just didn’t know what to say. AI could’ve hypothetically given me a rough draft or inspiration. Obviously I wouldn’t have just texted what the AI said, but it could’ve gotten me past the part I was stuck on.
In my experience, AI is shit at that anyway. 9 times out of 10 when I ask it anything even remotely deep it restates the problem like “I’m sorry to hear your parents couldn’t make it”. AI can’t really solve the problem google wants it to, and I’m honestly glad it can’t.
They’re trying to market emotion because emotion sells.
It’s also exactly what AI should be kept away from.
But ai also lies and hallucinates, so you can’t market it for writing work documents. That could get people fired.
Really though, I wonder if the marketing was already outsourced to the LLM?
Sadly, after working in Advertising for over 10 years, I know how dumb the art directors can be about messaging like this. It why I got out.
A lot of the times when you don’t know what to say, it’s not because you can’t find the right words, but the right words simply don’t exist. There’s nothing that captures your sorrow for the person.
Funny enough, the right thing to say is that you don’t know what to say. And just offer yourself to be there for them.
Yeah. If it had any empathy this would be a good task and a genuinely helpful thing. As it is, it’s going to produce nothing but pain and confusion and false hope if turned loose on this task.
The article makes a mention of the early part of the movie Her, where he’s writing a heartfelt, personal card that turns out to be his job, writing from one stranger to another. That reference was exactly on target: I think most of us thought outsourcing such a thing was a completely bizarre idea, and it is. It’s maybe even worse if you’re not even outsourcing to someone with emotions but to an AI.
I would abandon the friendship as a pointless endeavor
You’re in luck, you can subscribe to an AI friend instead. /s
You’ve seen porn addiction yes, but have you seen AI boyfriend emotional attachment addiction?
Guaranteed to ruin your life! Act now.
Those AI dating sites always have the creepiest uncanny valley profile photos. Its fun to scroll them sometimes.
Don’t date robots!
Brought to you by the Space Pope.
Shut up! You don’t understand what me and Marilyn Monrobot have together!
These seem like people who treat relationships like a game or an obligation instead of really wanting to know the person.
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If I was in some sort of distress and someone sent me a comforting message and I later found out they had ChatGPT write the message for them I think I would abandon the friendship as a pointless endeavor
My initial response is the same as yours, but I wonder… If the intent was to comfort you and the effect was to comfort you, wasn’t the message effective? How is it different from using a cell phone to get a reminder about a friend’s birthday rather than memorizing when the birthday is?
One problem that both the AI message and the birthday reminder have is that they don’t require much effort. People apparently appreciate having effort expended on their behalf even if it doesn’t create any useful result. This is why I’m currently making a two-hour round trip to bring a birthday cake to my friend instead of simply telling her to pick the one she wants, have it delivered, and bill me. (She has covid so we can’t celebrate together.) I did make the mistake of telling my friend that I had a reminder in my phone for this, so now she knows I didn’t expend the effort to memorize the date.
Another problem that only the AI message has is that it doesn’t contain information that the receiver wants to know, which is the specific mental state of the sender rather than just the presence of an intent to comfort. Presumably if the receiver wanted a message from an AI, she would have asked the AI for it herself.
Anyway, those are my Asperger’s musings. The next time a friend needs comforting, I will tell her “I wish you well. Ask an AI for inspirational messages appropriate for these circumstances.”
Another problem that only the AI message has is that it doesn’t contain information that the receiver wants to know, which is the specific mental state of the sender rather than just the presence of an intent to comfort.
I don’t think the recipient wants to know the specific mental state of the sender. Presumably, the person is already dealing with a lot, and it’s unlikely they’re spending much time wondering what friends not going through it are thinking about. Grief and stress tend to be kind of self-centering that way.
The intent to comfort is the important part. That’s why the suggestion of “I don’t know what to say, but I’m here for you” can actually be an effective thing to say in these situations.
Ask an AI for inspirational messages appropriate for these circumstances.
Don’t need to ask an AI when every website is AI-generated blogspam these days
“Dear Sydney” presents a world where Gemini can help us offload a heartwarming shared moment of connection with our children.
This is the problem I’ve had with the LLM announcements when they first came out. One of their favorite examples is writing a Thank You note.
The whole point of a Thank You note is that you didn’t have to write it, but you took time out of your day anyways to find your own words to thank someone.
Sincerity is a foreign concept to MBAs, VCs, and anyone who thinks they’re on a business Grind Set. They view the world as a game and interpersonal relationships as a game mechanic.
Ugh, who has time for that? I need all of my waking hours to be devoted to increasing work productivity and consuming products. Computers can feel my pesky feelings for me now.
Although I will use it to write resumes and cover letters when applying to jobs from now on. They use AI to weed out resumes. I figure the only way to beat that system is to use it against itself.
As an engineering manager, I’ve already received AI cover letters. Don’t do that. They suck. They get “round filed” faster than no cover letter at all. It’s insulting.
But apparently you’re not using AI to filter the resumes. A huge number of companies are. 42% as of this year.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240214-ai-recruiting-hiring-software-bias-discrimination
Companies like Google don’t understand how advanced AI algorithms work. They can sort of represent things like emotions by encoding relationships between high level concepts and trying to relate things together using logic.
This usually just means they’ll echo the emotions of whomever gave them input and amplify them to make some form of art, though.
People with power at Google are often very hateful people who will say hurtful things to each other, especially about concepts like money or death.
Robot, experience this dramatic irony for me!
reminds me of that bear from inside job
leans back and sips beer
So in the spring I got a letter from a student telling me how much they appreciate me as a teacher. At the time I was going through some s***. Still am frankly. So it meant a lot to me.That was such a nice letter.
I read it again the next day and realized it was too perfect. Some of the phrasing just didn’t make sense for a high school student. Some of the punctuation.
I have no doubt the student was sincere in their appreciation for me, But once I realized what they had done It cheapened those happy feelings. Blah.
You should’ve asked Gemini what to feel about it and how to response…
That’s the problem with how they are doing it, everyone seems to want AI to do everything, everywhere.
It is now getting on my own nerves, because more and more customers want to have somehow AI integrated in their websites, even when they don’t have a use for it.
We created a society of antisocial people who are maximized as efficient working machines to the point of drugging the ones that are struggling with it.
Of course they want AI to do it for them and end human interactions. It’s simpler that way.
I’m curious, if they had gone to their parent, gave them the same info, and come to the same message… would it have been less cheap feeling?
And do you know that isn’t the case? “Hey mom, I’m trying to write something nice to my teacher, this is what I have but it feels weird can you make a suggestion?” Is a perfectly reasonable thing to have happened.
I think there’s a different amount of effort involved in the two scenarios and that does matter. In your example, the kid has already drafted the letter and adding in a parent will make it take longer and involve more effort. I think the assumption is they didn’t go to AI with a draft letter but had it spit one out with a much easier to create prompt.
… But why did it cheapen it when they’re the one that sent it to you? Because someone helped them write it, somehow the meaning is meaningless?
That seems positively callous in the worst possible way.
It’s needless fear mongering because it doesn’t count because of arbitrary reason since it’s not how we used to do things in the good old days.
No encyclopedia references… No using the internet… No using Wikipedia… No quoting since language and experience isn’t somehow shared and built on the shoulders of the previous generations with LLMs being the equivalent of a literal human reference dictionary that people want to say but can’t recall themselves or simply want to save time in a world where time is more precious than almost anything lol.
The only reason anyone shouldn’t like AI is due to the power draw. And nearly every AI company is investing more in renewables than anyone everyone else while pretending like data centers are the bane of existence while they write on Lemmy watching YouTube and playing an online game lol.
David Joyner in his article On Artificial Intelligence and Authenticity gives an excellent example on how AI can cheapen the meaning of the gift: the thought and effort that goes into it.
In the opening synchronous meeting for one such class this semester, I was asked about this policy: if the work itself is the same, what does it matter whether it came from AI or not? I explained my thoughts with an analogy: imagine you have an assistant, whether that is an executive assistant at work or a family assistant at home or anyone else whose professional role is helping you with your role. Then, imagine your child’s (or spouse’s, I actually can’t remember which example I used in class) birthday is coming up. You could go out and shop for a present yourself, but you’re busy, so you ask this assistant to go pick out something. If your child found out that your assistant picked out the gift instead of you, would we consider it reasonable for them to be disappointed, even if the gift itself is identical to the one you would have purchased?
My class (those that spoke up, at least) generally agreed yes, it would be reasonable to expect the child to be disappointed: the gift is intended to represent more than just its inherent usefulness and value, but also the thought and effort that went into obtaining it. I continued the analogy by asking: now imagine if the gift was instead a prize selected for an employee-of-the-month sort of program. Would it be as disappointing for the assistant to buy it in that case? Likely not: in that situation, the gift’s value is more direct.
The assistant parallel is an interesting one, and I think that comes out in how I use LLMs as well. I’d never ask an assistant to both choose and get a present for someone; but I could see myself asking them to buy a gift I’d chosen. Or maybe even do some research on a particular kind of gift (as an example, looking through my gift ideas list I have “lightweight step stool” for a family member. I’d love to outsource the research to come up with a few examples of what’s on the market, then choose from those.). The idea is mine, the ultimate decision would be mine, but some of the busy work to get there was outsourced.
Last year I also wrote thank you letters to everyone on my team for Associate Appreciation Day with the help of an LLM. I’m obsessive about my writing, and I know if I’d done that activity from scratch, it would have easily taken me 4 hours. I cut it down to about 1.5hrs by starting with a prompt like, “Write an appreciation note in first person to an associate who…” then provided a bulleted list of accomplishments of theirs. It provided a first draft and I modified greatly from there, bouncing things off the LLM for support.
One associate was underperforming, and I had the LLM help me be “less effusive” and to “praise her effort” more than her results so I wasn’t sending a message that conflicted with her recent review. I would have spent hours finding the right ways of doing that on my own, but it got me there in a couple exchanges. It also helped me find synonyms.
In the end, the note was so heavily edited by me that it was in my voice. And as I said, it still took me ~1.5 hours to do for just the three people who reported to me at the time. So, like in the gift-giving example, the idea was mine, the choice was mine, but I outsourced some of the drafting and editing busy work.
IMO, LLMs are best when used to simplify or support you doing a task, not to replace you doing them.
This is exactly how I view LLMs and have used them before.
These people in these scenarios aren’t going ‘Amazon buy my gf a gift she likes.’
They’re going, please write a letter to my professor thanking them for their help and all they’ve done for me in biology.
I don’t know of anyone who trusts AI enough to just carte blanche fire off emails immediately after getting prompts back either.
The fear and cheapening of AI is the same fear and cheapening as every other advancement in technology.
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It’s not a a real conversation unless you talk face to face like a man
say it in a groupwrite it on parchment and inkpen and papertypewritertelegramphonecalltext messagefaxemail. E: rip strikethroughs? -
It’s not a real paper if it’s a meta analysis.
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It’s not it’s not it’s not.
All for arbitrary reasons that people have used to offset mundane garden levels of tedium or just outright ableist in some circumstances.
People also seriously overestimate their ability to detect AI writing or even pictures. That dude may very well have gotten a sincere letter without AI but they’ve already set it in their mind that the student wrote it with AI as if they know this student so well from 10 written assignments they probably don’t care about to 1 potentially sincerely written statement to them.
If people like that think it cheapens the value, that’s on them. People go on and on about removing pointless platitudes and dumb culturally ingrained shit but then clutch their pearls the moment one person toes outside the in-group.
It just feels so silly to me.
IT’S NOT ART UNLESS IT’S OIL ON CANVAS levels of dumb.
It’s not altruistic/good-natured unless you don’t benefit from it in any way and feel no emotion by doing it! You can’t help the homeless unless you follow the rules! You can’t give them money if you record it.
In the end, they still got that money. But somehow it devalues it because instead of raising two people up higher, you only raised one? It’s foolishness.
People also seriously overestimate other’s abilities and cheapen what their time is worth all the damn time.
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Glad to see others have also keyed in on just how lame this ad was.
My immediate thought was, if you (the guy doing the voiceover as the father) are so mentally deficient that you can’t even put together a four sentence paragraph of your own original thoughts for fanmail, then what hope do you have of doing anything else as a functioning adult?
Worse yet, what does this teach the kid?
It should be like a core memory for the kid to do this with her dad. It’s like having an LLM to play catch or do tea parties with her.
It teaches the kid to rely more and more on AI for everything, just like Google wants.
They’re already ‘thanking’ siri and alexa, this will be a very dangerous development.
Thanking a personified character doesn’t strike me as a bad thing.
Surely theres a more positive perspective where people are just naturally polite in their words and would struggle to communicate differently to a language bot.
It’s pretty frustrating how the venn diagram of ‘people who treat people like things’, and ‘people who treat things like people’ is a near circle.
You… you joke, but I know a few parents who would absolutely fail at something like this. Hell, they fail at basic math, and are barely literate.
I’m not saying this is a great idea for everyone, or that the ad is good. But the idea that “no one needs this” is extremely short sighted. For god sakes, the literacy rate in America alone isn’t even 95%, and over 50% of Americans aren’t proficient in English.
Again. This ad sucks for lots of reasons. But don’t pretend idiots can’t make it through adulthood, never mind become parents. The idiots are usually the ones with the most kids.
AI systems are still a useful tool.
I wonder what would happen if the world found out that Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (or any other celebrity/athlete/role model) was using Chat GPT to respond to fan mail. My gut feeling is that people would find it disingenuous at best – and there would probably be significant outrage.
Where’s the AI that does my dishes and cleans my house so I have more time to write, create, and connect with others? That’s the technology I want – not one that does the meaningful part and leaves the menial stuff up to me.
Wow, this is an unfair take and very judgemental. I can think of a dozen reasons why an adult might have trouble writing a letter aside from being “mentally deficient.” Dyslexia, anxiety, poor education, not being a native speaker, ADHD, etc.
Trust me, I thought the ad was lame and a bleak use case for AI, but you don’t have to crucify a parent for doing their best to help their kid.
Dyslexia, anxiety, poor education, not being a native speaker, ADHD, etc.
That “etc.” certainly includes living in an anti-intellectual society full of emotionally stunted people who learned that men shouldn’t care about feelings and that reading is for dorks.
Totally agree.
lists mental deficiencies
Honestly they could have avoided this by asking the daughter to input some legitimate sentiments and had AI help her express them.
Instead they offload the task entirely, removing any thought or sincerity.
Well said.
That’s not fan mail. That’s spam.
The people making these ads can’t fathom anything past pure efficiency. It’s what their entire job revolves around, efficiently using corporate resources to maximize the amount of people using or paying for a product.
Sure, I would like to be more efficient when writing, but that doesn’t mean writing the whole letter for me, it means giving me pointers on how to start it, things to emphasize, or how to reword something that doesn’t sound quite right, so I don’t spend 10 minutes staring at an email wondering if the way I worded it will be taken the wrong way.
AI is a tool, it is not a replacement for humans. Trying to replace true human interaction with an LLM is like trying to replace an experienced person’s job with a freshly hired intern with no experience. Sure, they can technically do the job, but they won’t do it well. It’s only a benefit when the intern works with the existing knowledgeable individuals in the field to do better work.
If we try to use AI to replace the entire process, we just end up with this:
That flowchart example is idiotic but I love it. The formal cover letter in between is more idiotic. It would be cool if we could collectively agree to just send “I’d like this job” instead of all the bullshit.
A lot of what we do as a society is redundant, but I do think fully written emails or cover letters have merit (even if it’s the same template replicated for multiple applications,)
It helps the reviewer understand if you’re articulate with your speech, gives them additional context to your resume, and lets them better match applicants with their current work environment.
That said, a lot of the process is still redundant anyways, and considering many hiring processes are now entirely automated, a more concise, standardized method of providing the same information would likely be more manageable and efficient for most people.
There’s already too many applicants for every job opening. If you make the process even more automated public job listings/applicants will be sidelined entirely.
My team hired a jr dev a few months ago. The posting got several thousand responses on LinkedIn alone. We noped out of wading through all of those and just went the referral route.
But, you and everyone else would just say “I want this job” but they want the best person for the job. Putting up with bullshit is invariably going to be part of the job.
They can compare my resume with the other applicants’. I don’t mind.
“Hey Google, raise my children.”
People have been trying that for a bit, it’s not working too well
Sounds like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, who would then start trying to argue with Google as a whole or fix it.
I mean it kinda already is with all the parents putting kids in front of YouTube to watch Pregnant Spiderman breastfeed baby Elsa.
That’s the perpetuum mobile of a certain kind of utopias.
Bolsheviks literally dreamed of “child combinates” (why would someone call it something like this, I dunno) where workers would offload their children to be cared for, while they themselves could work and enjoy their lives and such.
I’d say this tells enough about the kind of people these dreamers were and also that they didn’t have any children of their own.
Though this is in the same row as the “glass of water” thing, which hints that there also weren’t many women among them.
For some people utopia is a kind of Sparta with spaceships, where not only everything is common and there’s no money, but also people own nothing, decide nothing, hold on to nothing, and children are collective property.
BNW
I said all these things to my partner when I saw the ad as well.
I’ve spent more time helping my kid write Steam reviews of the games they’re playing than this Dad did on writing a letter to his daughter’s hero.
Simple as. Don’t be surprised when the kid puts you in a crappy home to afford more Gemini credit or whatever.
Well, some parents sincerely think they give more love by buying some new shiny thing, or, say, using an LLM to write a letter, than they do by just talking.
Imagine a man, autistic but in denial (“I’M NORMAL”) with constant imitation who can’t say a word without looking like a broken toy with clearly fake emotions and refusing to understand that this is not what one does when they show love. When said how that looks they just try harder at imitation or get furious. They don’t understand that sincere emotions do not require effort. If you’re autistic, yours look differently. But if you’re autistic, but terribly afraid of being “not normal” (grown in ex-USSR backwater working-class environment), you won’t accept the possibility and will just try harder to act. That’d be my dad (LLM’s didn’t exist back then, but).
It’s tragic, not necessarily about putting less effort.
And this works for any pain people might try to cover with some technological perceived miracle. Which is why such things are poison which does get inhaled by some even now.
Okay. I’m a transhumanist. I like AI, automation, and the abolishment of involuntary labor as well as obligatory adversity. Even I thought this ad was super fucking creepy. How the fuck do you justify sending your daughter an auto-generated letter? Now, not only do you not care enough to do it yourself, you’re lying to her about it.
Other way around - the AI is writing a letter “from” the daughter to be sent to the athlete. Still BS though, and I’m sure famous people just love getting spam fan mail where the person couldn’t be bothered to draft it themself.
I was remembering an ad that I saw yesterday(?), so either I mis-remembered, mis-understood, or mistook the ad mentioned in the article for the one I saw.
Regardless, ty for letting me know.
Imagine finding out that everything wise your parent had ever said to you was read verbatim from an AI tool.
It’d explain a lot, actually. 🤔
Yeah, since 2016 it’s become apparent that my father never believed anything he said about morals when I was a kid. Just saying the words he thought he was supposed to say.
From my end, it’s more to do with the fact that my parents’ advice has been consistently bad and so have their life decisions.
If i look around me, the people have stopped caring and been lying about it for years.
Either Google knows it’s audience, or the ad was sent to the wrong crowd.
Once you realize that everyone that works in marketing is a soulless demon, the world starts to make a lot more sense.
this has to be just right
And then he couldn’t even bother to choose the words himself
It’s not implying he can’t be bothered, but that the machine can do a better job.
…which may be true, depending on just how bad he is at writing. Like, I was just watching this classic the other day. If this guy writes like some of those people, the machine may infact be better.
That said, for most people it’s stupid, and the tech isn’t able to do a better job at expressing such things.
Yet.
But doesn’t it matter that the machine isn’t expressing anything? It’s regurgitating words that are a facsimile of emotion. That matters to me. Especially in the long term. Since shorthand and texting became a thing, kids’ writing became way, way worse according to TAs and teachers I know. Which, that was a byproduct of a change in writing styles, so while kinda pathetic, it’s somewhat understandable. But this is just shoving itself between us and our own feelings. Say google gets their wish, everything we write to each other that ever matters more than a simple surface level conversation is expressed via LLMs. Where will that leave us? What does that leave us? We’re closing ourselves off from the world with technology. And we’re cheering for a new tech that will allow us to retreat even further away from human experience. That’s goddamn depressing if you ask me. And to answer my own question, it leaves us work, consumption, and fucking nothin.
This tech isn’t here to free us. From work, from tedium. It’s here to relegate us only to the tedium.
LLMs can also be helpful when your actual feelings should NOT be conveyed. For example, I can have a genuine response to someone along the lines of, “You are dumb for so many reasons, here are just a few of them that show you are out of touch with what our product can do, and frankly with reality itself. {Enumerated list with copious amounts of cursing and belittling}” Ok LLM, rewrite that message using professional office language because I emotionally refuse to.
Pshh fellow comrades…
Then you haven’t seen the movie theater ad they are showing where they ask the Genini AI to write a break up letter for them.
Anyone that does that, deserves to be alone for the rest of their days.
Ah, yes. I’m mostly on the receiving side of such and haven’t had much luck in relationships, but getting ghosted after a few forced words, uneasy looks, maybe even kinda hurtedly-mocking remarks about my personality that I can’t change is one thing, it’s still human, though unjust, but OK.
While a generated letter with generated reasons and generated emotions feels, eh, just like something from the first girl I cared about, only her parents had amimia, so it wasn’t completely her fault that all she said felt 90% fake (though it took me 10 years to accept that what she did actually was betrayal).
