Outsourcing emotion: The horror of Google’s “Dear Sydney” AI ad

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."

 

Every time I see this ad, it puts me on edge in a way I've had trouble putting into words (though Gemini itself has some helpful thoughts). As someone who writes words for a living, the idea of outsourcing a writing task to a machine brings up some vocational anxiety. And the idea of someone who's "pretty good with words" doubting his abilities when the writing "has to be just right" sets off alarm bells regarding the superhuman framing of AI capabilities.

 

But 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.

 

The "Dear Sydney" ad.

 

It's a distressing answer to what's still an incredibly common question in the AI space: What do you actually use these things for?

Yes, I can help

Marketers have a difficult task when selling the public on their shiny new AI tools. An effective ad for an LLM has to make it seem like a superhuman do-anything machine but also an approachable, friendly helper. An LLM has to be shown as good enough to reliably do things you can't (or don't want to) do yourself, but not so good that it will totally replace you.

 

Microsoft's 2024 Super Bowl ad for Copilot is a good example of an attempt to thread this needle, featuring a handful of examples of people struggling to follow their dreams in the face of unseen doubters. "Can you help me?" those dreamers ask Copilot with various prompts. "Yes, I can help" is the message Microsoft delivers back, whether through storyboard images, an impromptu organic chemistry quiz, or "code for a 3D open world game."

 

Microsoft's Copilot marketing sells it as a helper for achieving your dreams.

 

The "Dear Sydney" ad tries to fit itself into this same box, technically. The prompt in the ad starts with "Help my daughter..." and the tagline at the end offers "A little help from Gemini." If you look closely near the end, you'll also see Gemini's response starts with "Here's a draft to get you started." And to be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with using an LLM as a writing assistant in this way, especially if you have a disability or are writing in a non-native language.

 

But the subtle shift from Microsoft's "Help me" to Google's "Help my daughter" changes the tone of things. 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.

 

It's one thing to use AI to help you with the most tedious parts of your job, as people do in recent ads for Salesforce's Einstein AI. It's another to tell your daughter to go ask the computer for help pouring their heart out to their idol.

Starting point or endpoint?

Google sees the message of the ad differently, of course. "We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity but can never replace it," Google spokesperson Alana Beale told SFGate. "Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA. It showcases a real-life track enthusiast and her father and aims to show how the Gemini app can provide a starting point, thought starter, or early draft for someone looking for ideas for their writing."

 

The idea of AI output as a mere "starting point" for human endeavors has long been key to the marketing balancing act. That Copilot Superbowl ad, for instance, includes outputs with numerous "brainstormed" storyboard images and signage designs for the human prompter to pick from.

 

This commercial showing somebody having a child use AI to write a fan letter to her hero SUCKS. Obviously there are special circumstances and people who need help, but as a general “look how cool, she didn’t even have to write anything herself!” story, it SUCKS. Who wants an AI-written fan letter??

 

— Linda Holmes (@lindaholmes.bsky.social) Jul 27, 2024 at 8:48 AM

 

Besides making the AI seem more approachable, the "starting point" framing helps obscure that current AI models usually aren't good enough to operate without significant human intervention. In most professional cases, you still need a human editor or designer to weed out the hallucinated or nonsensical AI-generated options. And even quality AI output often needs editing to avoid coming across as non-human.

But humans are lazy. It's a small leap from "Generate some ideas I can use as a starting point" to "Eh, that starting point looks fine; just submit it as is." That might be fine for busywork situations where the quality of the output isn't paramount. But as NPR's Linda Holmes memorably wrote, "Who wants an AI-written fan letter??"

 

To Google's credit, putting the "Dear Sydney" ad prompt into Google Gemini returns a response that's clearly labeled as "a draft to get you started," as in the ad. The response even suggests that the prompter "add more personal details to make the letter even more special. For example, your daughter could mention a specific race she watched or a particular quality she admires about Sydney."

 

But when we put the same prompt into the subscribers-only Gemini Advanced model, that "draft" framing is gone. Instead, you get a short letter that's implicitly ready to send once you fill in the bracketed "[Daughter's name]" sections.

 

A kid that gets a response like that isn't going to see LLMs as a useful "starting point" tool to avoid writer's block when confronted with a blank page. They're going to see LLMs as a way to generate a complete letter that they can pass off as their own—just fill in your name here, and there's no need to add any more personal touch.

 

The whole thing reminds me of the opening scene in Spike Jonze's 2013 movie Her. While Joaquin Phoenix's protagonist at first seems to be dictating a heartfelt letter to a loved one, it quickly becomes clear he is working as one of many faceless drones for "beautifulhandwrittenletters.com," writing a touching message on behalf of a stranger and intended for another stranger.

 

The scene is a clear statement on the alienating, dehumanizing effects of outsourcing the emotional labor of personal writing. It's also a look at a world where the idea of writing your own personal message to a loved one is apparently so foreign to people that it has become an economically viable business model for outsourced specialists.

 

As a vision of the future (present?) of letter writing—and creative work in general—Google's "Dear Sydney" ad might be even more grim. I want AI-powered tools to automate the most boring, mundane tasks in my life, giving me more time to spend on creative, life-affirming moments with my family. Google’s ad seems to imply that these life-affirming moments are also something to be avoided—or at least made pleasingly more efficient—through the use of AI.