What the outrage over Google’s AI Olympics ad is really about

Google's recent efforts at harnessing the aspirational goals of the Olympics to promote its new Gemini AI tool have backfired in some circles. Photo: Bloomberg

In recent years, the sense of disconnect between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world has been growing. I'm not just singling out Silicon Valley, however; I’m referring to any part of the world that’s fuelled by the high-tech dreams of entrepreneurs, engineers and venture capitalists, without taking other perspectives into account.

This especially holds true amid the breakneck advancements of AI. Companies both young and old are trying to secure a future for themselves with an AI land grab while the public's attention spans are getting increasingly shorter.

Even for the entrenched entities like Google's parent company, Alphabet, there’s increasing difficulty when it comes to standing out in the corporate crowd flooded with AI chatbots, large language models and new platforms. Yet Google has a decidedly competitive advantage in the battle for attention – it has plenty of cash and a brand recognition that’s the envy of just about any corporation.

That advantage was on full display during the opening week of the 2024 Paris Olympics, when the internet search giant ran an ad showcasing its AI tool, Gemini.

In the ad, a father proudly narrates over video clips of his young daughter showing her affinity for running. The father in the ad makes it a point to say how his daughter is a fan of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the US track star and Olympic gold medallist. We then see a video of Google’s Gemini tool generating some answers in response to the prompt, “how to teach hurdle technique”.

The theme of the ad then suddenly pivots, with the father giving Gemini another prompt. “Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney, how inspiring she is,” he says. We’re then shown an almost instantaneous response from Gemini, providing a draft for a potential letter to McLaughlin-Levrone. The ad ends with the tagline: “A little help from Gemini.”

For those of us who cover technology, and in particular the concerns about labour disruption and the ethics surrounding AI, the initial response to the ad was predictable – at least on social media platforms.

“Anyone else bothered by the ad where the dad asks Google Gemini to help her kid write a fan letter to Sydney McLaughlin? Do we need AI for a kid to write [to] an athlete?” the radio morning host Andrew Perloff wrote on X.

“This new Google AI ad is completely insane and I don’t understand how this gets made,” the social media journalist Josh Billinson posted on Threads. “Why sit down with your child and help them express their thoughts when you can just ask the robot to make them up!”

Those were just a few of the countless visceral responses to the ad, putting Google on the defensive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, or maybe coincidentally, the comment section on the company’s YouTube page for Gemini was disabled. Adding to the pile-on, a few news outlets interviewed ad experts and technology ethicists about how and why the ad fell flat.

This backlash comes just weeks after Apple, another entrenched consumer technology company, experienced something similar.

While introducing its new iPad Pro and iPad Air during a live-streamed product announcement, Apple showcased a minute-long video titled “Crush!”, which depicted musical instruments, paint cans, brushes, record players, video game consoles, easels and metronomes being destroyed between two metal blocks, only to later reveal that all the obliterated items were replaced by the iPad.

“The destruction of the human experience, courtesy of Silicon Valley,” actor Hugh Grant wrote on X. “Why did Apple do an ad that crushes the arts?” actor Justine Bateman posted. Some critics even re-edited the ad to give it less of a destructive look.

In a rare move, Apple admitted to the trade publication AdWeek that the ad “missed the mark”.

By no means are all these criticisms without merit necessarily. Advertisements and promotional videos have long been treated as fair game, especially by the ad creatives who spend countless hours trying to perfect their craft. Criticism comes with the territory, especially in an era of social media where everybody is a critic, and ads receive instant and sometimes unsolicited feedback.

I should also point out that Apple, Google and their high-tech counterparts are more than capable of receiving criticism while remaining unscathed.

All that said, the recent blitz of negative feedback garnered by both companies says more about the public than it does about the companies, their products or their visions for how technology will affect our lives.

For Google’s situation, I should point out that nowhere in the ad does the narrator suggest he's never going to teach his daughter how to write, and perhaps more importantly, he never implies he's going to encourage his daughter to plagiarise. In a conversational manner, he simply asks Google to help his daughter write a letter.

It doesn’t take repeated viewings of the ad to show that there’s plenty of nuance, and I think, to most viewers, the message was well-received. You can use Gemini to enrich your life the same way you’ve used Google’s search engine over the past couple of decades.

With Apple’s recent video, nowhere is the company calling for the destruction of property or objects. It’s simply showing, in 60 seconds, just how powerful Apple thinks its latest iPad is.

At the end of the day it’s a commercial, not a step-by-step guide on how we should live our lives.

Would anybody have raged against calculator advertisements back in the 1970s for destroying the idea of mathematics? Of course not.

That said, could these recent ads have been better executed? Of course. That's the growing chasm I referred to earlier between Silicon Valley and the public, but that’s the nature of the technology beast.

The collective concerns about the ads, at least in some circles, show that despite how engaged and evolved we like to think we are when it comes to our relationship with technology, there’s still more than enough fear of the unknown to make even the most seasoned professionals feel scared about the future, especially with AI.

In that same breath, it’s OK to be scared. But perspective is needed before we start dismissing AI tools as solely dehumanising and job killing. There’s room for nuance, there’s room for optimism, and yes, there’s room for regulations if needed.