RATE THIS EXAMPLE FROM "BENEFICIAL" TO "HARMFUL"

BENEFICIAL HARMFUL

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Dear Sydney - Olympics

Background Information
Google is running a new commercial during the Olympics. It’s about a cute little girl—she’s a runner, and she loves Team USA’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, a world-record-holding track star who won two Olympic gold medals in 2021. The little girl wants to write her a letter. So Dad fires up an AI chatbot.

“Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone how inspiring she is,” he asks Google’s Gemini. He instructs it to add a line about how his daughter plans to break McLaughlin-Levrone’s world record one day (and to be sure to include the phrase sorry, not sorry.) The ad never shows the final letter in full, just pans over snippets of it. The whole thing is supposed to be endearing, demonstrating to viewers how AI can help forge human connection and facilitate creativity.

But come on: Nothing about this ad makes sense.

Isn’t what makes a letter like this cute the fact that it is written by a child? Shouldn’t a young person get to explore their feelings and then authentically relay them? And what about McLaughlin-Levrone? Will she be able to tell that the letter was written by AI? How would she feel about that? Would she send back her own AI-composed message, thanking the child for taking the time to write to her?

The whole thing is bleak. It takes the feel-good cliché of a child getting to interact with their idol and squishes a multimillion-dollar large language model between them. Google is pitching a world in which even the most personal interactions are mediated by computers. The company may make bold claims about AI’s capabilities to radically advance civilization. But it can’t escape the reality that it’s co-opting the hopeful aesthetics of the Olympics, which are meant to celebrate human accomplishments, in order to promote a digital technology that can be used to undermine human labor.

The reaction so far has not been positive. The author Will Leitch said the ad “takes a little chunk out of my soul every time I see it.” The professor and media personality Shelly Palmer wrote that it makes him “want to scream.” On YouTube, where Google posted the ad four days ago, comments are turned off—a step that the company does not typically take on its videos, and one that suggests concern about a backlash.
Technique Used
Activate Emotion
This is propaganda because
Google wants to connect to people's strong feelings about competitive sports as they promote their AI products and services.
Source
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/07/google-dear-sydney-olympic-ad/679292/?utm_campaign=atlantic-intelligence&utm_content=20240802&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Atlantic+Intelligence

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