The tech giant initially defended the advertisement.
Google removed an Olympics advertisement for its chatbot Gemini due to complaints over a depiction of a little girl using artificial intelligence to write fan letters, as per a report in CNBC. In the advertisement, "Dear Sydney," a girl's father asks an AI chatbot to assist in writing a message to Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, a sprinter and hurdler for the United States, who happens to be his daughter's favourite athlete.
The father said in the advertisement, "Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is." The commercial then plays a short clip of the draft that Gemini created before concluding with a clip of the little girl sprinting over the track. The words "A little help from Gemini" overlayed over it. The short ad, which was aired regularly during the first week of the Games, has been removed from the air but is still accessible on YouTube.
However, many users argued why Google would want to replace a child's creativity, authenticity and emotions with AI or computers. The tech giant initially defended the ad, which was played during the breaks, saying that the AI chatbot Gemini "could provide a starting point for a piece of writing."
They later said, "While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we have decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation." "We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it," the statement said. "Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA," it added.
Many users took to social media to express their displeasure.
"As humans, we crave originality, especially in important emails and letters. Nobody wants them to be AI-generated because it implies the message was crafted without care, which defeats the purpose. We want important messages to reflect the care of the person who crafted them, hoping the emotions evoked are genuine. This is no longer the case if the text is AI-generated," said a user.
"This is great but I'm still stunned that no one at Google realized how terrible the ad was to begin with," added another person.
A third said, "i find that so distasteful and so sad! seems like literally the last thing AI should be used for."
"I find it so strange and disheartening that of all the uses of AI google could have gone with for an ad, they chose... a child writing a fan letter to an athlete they admire. Dude, tell your kid to write from their heart, who wants a weird robonote from an 8 year old?" said a user.