(NewsNation) — If you didn’t see a father ask Google’s AI chatbot Gemini to help his daughter write a letter to her favorite Olympic athlete, you’ve missed your chance. Google has pulled the TV ad that had been running on NBC’s Olympics coverage.
The ad, dubbed “Dear Sydney,” drew loud criticism over the idea of a father not personally helping his daughter write a letter to Olympic track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
“It is one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen,” wrote Syracuse University media professor Shelly Palmer on his personal blog.
“The commercial suggests that a poorly worded prompt, processed by a pattern-matching autocomplete algorithm, can empower an LLM to articulate a person’s feelings better than the person themselves,” he added.
“Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA,” Google spokesperson Alana Beale told The Washington Post. “While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we have decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation.”
While the ad will no longer air on TV, it is still visible online.
Apple faced a similar backlash earlier this year over a TV ad promoting the latest model of the iPad Pro. The ad shows various tools of human creativity — a metronome, a vinyl record player, jars of paint, musical instruments and a film camera — being crushed by a huge press, which then lifts to reveal the iPad.
