Alexandra Petri, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post, is having none of this Google Gemini ad, featuring a dad using it to write a letter from his daughter to her hero, Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone:

All of the buffoons excited by the prospect of AI taking over all our writing — report summaries, data surveys, children’s letters, all tossed into the same pile indiscriminately — are missing the point in a spectacular manner. Do you know what writing is?

It is thinking in a form that you can share with other people. It is a method for taking thoughts and images and stories out of your brain and putting them into someone else’s brain. E.M. Forster quotes a woman saying, “How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?” To take away the ability to write for yourself is to take away the ability to think for yourself.

Why outsource our thinking to AI?

Ironically, without the Gemini bit, it’s already a quite lovely fan letter to McLaughlin-Levrone. Google simply selected the wrong product to advertise. With the videos and voiceovers, it could have been an ad for YouTube.

(Via Dwight Silverman.)

Update: Google pulled the ad:

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

Perhaps some new “testers” are needed.