Google Pulls Its Bad Gemini Olympics Ad About Writing an AI Letter

For those of you who watched the early Olympics coverage, you might have seen an ad from Google that has since been pulled. The “Google + Team USA — Dear Sydney” spot was yanked from their Olympics rotation, but can still be seen on YouTube and is embedded below.

Why pull this ad featuring Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone? Well, it really missed the mark, to put it nicely.

The ad tells the story of a father and daughter who are into running. The daughter has started to follow McLaughlin-Levrone’s career, because she’s pretty awesome and an incredible track athlete. The dad decides they should write a fan letter to Sydney, only instead of sitting down and writing it together, they lean on Gemini to do almost all of the work.

See how that’s bad? Instead of writing a letter from the heart, with whatever creativity they can muster, and putting pen to paper from scratch, they ask Google’s AI for help. It sets a weird (and bad) example for people by suggesting AI – instead of their own brain – could do something as meaningful as writing a letter to a hero.

From the minute the ad launched, criticism of it could be found all over the internet, and probably rightly so.

Google said in a statement to Variety today “While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we have decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation.”

They continued by suggesting they aren’t attempting to replace creativity and were instead suggesting folks use Gemini to get a little help from the start: “We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it. Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA. It showcases a real-life track enthusiast and her father, and aims to show how the Gemini app can provide a starting point, thought starter, or early draft for someone looking for ideas for their writing.”

The ad is below.