I don't like the idea of having AI write a bunch of stuff as a substitute for human creativity. Use it to check your spelling, grammar, and such. Don't use it to write an entire essay, book, or fan letter to an athlete. After all, if you don't care enough to actually write something yourself why should I want to read it? Don't give me the excuse of, "I have an idea for a story but I'm not a good enough writer to do it," because like anything in life it takes practice. I look at some of my blog posts from back in late 2010/2011 and cringe at myself, but I've been out here plugging away at it slowly getting better at creating content folks enjoy reading. I don't use some AI machine to write my thoughts on the latest Marvel flick for me, I actually write my thoughts. Otherwise, they aren't really mine, they're just a bunch of code pretending to be a human. With this in mind, Google and their Gemini AI really stepped in it with a new ad campaign.
The idea of the advertisement is a Father has a daughter who loves running and looks up to Olympic track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. So they use Google AI to generate a letter to the athlete to make sure it is...somehow better than if his kid really wrote it? It is creepy to think we are going to use a computer to simulate the musings of a child wanting to tell an athlete how they look up to them. The whole thing sounds lazy and takes the idea of writing a deeply personal note to someone you look up to before reducing it to a chatbot prompt. It lacks soul, in other words. Nobody likes the ad and Google itself has admitted it is a big misfire. It's dumb and makes zero sense. We should be using AI to do our busywork so that we can focus on creating literature and art, not the other way around. If we utilize AI to, "Create," our entertainment it is just a bland combination of stuff that came before a machine, "Thought," to smash together and make something ostensibly, "New." Google should've considered this before making such a terrible and in some ways terrifying ad. Other folks and I really hate it the more we think about it. The one good thing about this is how viscerally everyone reacted with disgust. That gives me hope.
I'm reminded of an episode in Brooks' "Bobos in Paradise" about high-ranking people in the chattering class and how they have aides to handle various routine tasks. An aide wrote a column for some stuffed shirt, which was subsequently published. The aide meanwhile moved on to be an aide to another stuffed shirt. The second stuffed shirt read the column and liked it, and so had the aide (who had written the column in the first place!) write a fan latter to the first stuffed shirt.
ReplyDeleteThe point being that in much of the economy, writing a fan letter isn't intended to be a sincere expression of anything but rather to draw attention to the letter-writer and the letter-writer's support in the mind of addressee. And given that the target audience for any serious AI product is business executives, it seems likely the ad was targeted to executives as relieving them of the work of writing fan letters that they no longer have secretaries to write.