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.
“Hey Google, raise my children.”
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.
