Google has pulled an ad it showed during the Olympics that featured its artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini writing a fan letter to an athlete.
Google The company has pulled an Olympic ad for its chatbot Gemini from airwaves after facing backlash over the way it depicted a little girl using artificial intelligence to write a fan letter.
The ad, titled “Dear Sydney,” shows a girl’s father prompting an artificial intelligence chatbot to help write a letter to her favorite athlete, American hurdler and sprinter Sydney McLaughlin-Lefrone . Last year, following the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google launched Gemini (formerly Bard).
“Gemini, write a letter for my daughter to tell Sidney how inspiring she is,” the father says in the ad, prompting Gemini to do so. The ad then briefly shows a draft of Gemini’s production and ends with a shot of a little girl running on a track, accompanied by a text overlay that reads “With a little help from Gemini.”
Ads are still visible on YouTube But it was pulled from the airwaves and played repeatedly during the first week of the Games.
In a statement to CNBC, a Google spokesperson said, “While the ad was well tested before airing, due to feedback we have decided to phase out the ad from our Olympic rotation.”
Google said it still sees the Gemini app as useful in providing a “starting point” for writing ideas.
“We believe artificial intelligence can be an important tool to augment human creativity, but can never replace it,” the statement read. “Our goal was to create an authentic story that celebrates Team America.”
Google has previously defended the ad. However, backlash continues to grow as people accuse the company of encouraging the use of automation over authenticity, especially with children.
“I categorically reject the future of Google advertising,” Shelly Palmer, senior media professor at Syracuse University’s SI Newhouse School of Public Communications, wrote in a widely circulated article. blog post. The technology, she writes, presents “a monocultural future in which we see fewer and fewer examples of primitive human thought.”
Google isn’t the only company to be criticized for promoting ads that replace creative tasks with artificial intelligence.
In a recent ad, apple showed off a hydraulic press that crushed musical instruments and paint cans to showcase its new iPad Pro. The company eventually apologized and pulled the ad from television.
Despite training artificial intelligence models on original creative work, OpenAI technical lead Mira Murati recently said that artificial intelligence will cause some creative jobs to disappear, but some of them should not exist in the first place. Hollywood actors and unions are backlash after Scarlett Johansson said OpenAI copied her voice to create a new ChatGPT AI voice called “Sky.”
Revealed: CNBC parent company NBCUniversal owns NBC Sports and NBC Olympics. NBC Olympics is the U.S. rights holder for all summer and winter Olympics through 2032.
watch: In the long run, artificial intelligence will “eat a lot of software”
About The Author
