Google's Olympics ad went viral for all the wrong reasons

Remember the universal childhood experience of writing a fan letter to someone you admire? Well, a new Google ad says artificial intelligence can now do that for you. In case you haven’t seen it, the TV advertisement shows a father describing his daughter’s love for an American Olympic track star. It shows the young girl training to compete like her hero, thanks to tips generated by Google’s AI search feature. Then the dad asks Google’s chatbot to generate a letter from his daughter to the athlete. But to many critics online, the ad appeared to be the latest example of a tech company being disconnected from real people. It’s a striking miss for the company, which has positioned its AI tool as its answer to a rival’s product and is working to incorporate the technology throughout its suite of products. The backlash underscored a broader fear about artificial intelligence, as the technology permeates more and more areas of our lives. Tech companies have promised that AI will make our lives easier by removing the need for humans to complete menial tasks. But many early AI tools seem to do the opposite, instead enabling computers to generate traditionally human creative outputs. Some creatives, including musicians and visual artists, have already raised alarms about AI replacing them. And others have sued tech firms over the alleged use of their copyrighted works to train AI models. And yet tech firms have forged ahead with rolling out AI tools that can create new emojis, speak and even generate videos. Apple faced similar backlash earlier this year when it released an ad that showed symbols of human creativity being replaced by an iPad Pro. Apple quickly apologized for ‘missing the mark’ with the advertisement.