Those Olympic AI ads feel bad for a reason

If you’ve spent any time watching the Olympics on NBC or Peacock over the past two weeks, you’ve almost certainly seen them: schmaltzy advertisements for the world’s biggest corporations’ new AI tools. From Google’s Gemini to Microsoft’s Copilot and Meta AI, artificial intelligence is inescapable at the Summer Games, ostensibly an event about showcasing the best of human ability. Meta’s begins with a sad lady on a couch asking AI how to prepare for a marathon. In Microsoft’s, a pregnant woman asks Copilot to write an email about weight training (are we sensing a theme here?), while a dad asks it to summarize his morning calls so he has more time to help his son practice boxing. The uplifting music and vaguely inspiring taglines — “Expand your world” and “You, empowered,” respectively — are meant to show how using AI can act as something of a personal assistant, leaving users with more time to spend on the things that matter. As far as Olympics-themed ad campaigns for tech giants go, it’s pretty standard stuff. This was not the case with Google’s “Dear Sydney” ad, which centers around a father whose daughter is an aspiring track star and superfan of American Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The daughter, we learn, wants to write a letter to tell McLaughlin-Levrone just how much she means to her. But in a baffling move, the father then decides to ask Google’s Gemini to simply churn one out for her, turning what could have been a heartwarming father-daughter bonding moment into an opportunity to generate whatever a chatbot’s version of a fan letter is. To say it wasn’t a hit would be an understatement. The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri wrote that the commercial “makes me want to throw a sledgehammer into the television every time I see it,” and that it was “one of those ads that makes you think, perhaps evolution was a mistake.” “Their pitch is really, ‘hey, we can feel and express emotions so your daughter doesn’t have to’?” asked sports writer Shehan Jeyarajah on X. Tech consultant Shelly Palmer, who advises companies on AI, wrote that “‘Dear Sydney’ was “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” After closing down the comments section on its YouTube page, Google eventually pulled the ad from NBCUniversal’s coverage, writing in a statement to Variety that “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’s not the first marketing blunder by a tech company in recent months. This May, Apple released an ad to promote its new iPad in which a hydraulic press literally crushes physical objects used in creative practices: a piano, paint buckets, a mannequin, a drum set, and cameras, leaving nothing but a single iPad. As the Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto pointed out at the time, “The message many of us received was this: Apple, a trillion-dollar behemoth, will crush everything beautiful and human, everything that’s a pleasure to look at and touch, and all that will be left is a skinny glass and metal slab.” It wasn’t a great look, considering widespread fears over how technology like AI, which Apple has invested heavily in, will replace jobs and make existing ones worse. Marketing tactics that boast about AI’s ability to render meaningful activities — like, say, painting, or writing a letter with your daughter — worth little more than a single button-click come across as deeply tone-deaf to a population who is already anxious about the future of the technology. According to a 2023 Pew survey, 52 percent of Americans said that they were more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in their daily lives. Though its boosters have spent the past two years claiming that artificial intelligence will soon be the “great equalizer” of creativity, turning average joes into artistic geniuses, and that it provides all the perks of a personal assistant with the push of a button, signs as of late point instead to the idea that AI is a bubble that may be on the verge of bursting. The stock market’s heavy losses this week were led by tech companies who have been bullish on AI like chipmaker Nvidia and Amazon, in part due to the extraordinarily high cost of running AI models (it’s estimated that OpenAI spends $700,000 per day to run ChatGPT, and the more it’s used, the higher the cost), and the economic reality that at some point, the bill has to be paid. The tone of the ads recall those for crypto, Web3, and the metaverse that were omnipresent during the 2022 Super Bowl, drafting a cadre of celebrities to shill unregulated currency for the likes of FTX, Coinbase, and Crypto.com. Both heralded their respective technologies as the next great innovation that will make humans hyper-productive (in the case of AI) and rich (both). Since then, following a massive downturn in crypto prices and all three companies either bankrupt or mired in scandal, crypto was completely absent from the 2023 and 2024 Super Bowls. Even back in 2022, people criticized the ads for their tone-deafness and obvious fraudulence: They “feel like Pets.com all over again,” per Wired, citing the notorious tech bubble of the 2000s. Much like crypto, the AI tools peddled by tech companies today are environmental disasters, using up as much energy as an entire country. That’s expected to double by 2026, and it also includes the millions of gallons of water needed to cool the equipment. Those environmental and ethical dilemmas haven’t stopped NBC and the International Olympic Committee from embracing AI wholeheartedly, even as the Paris Games promised to be the “most sustainable” ever held. Some of NBC’s coverage uses an AI version of 79-year-old sportscaster Al Michaels’ voice, while the IOC launched an Intel-powered chatbot where athletes can ask questions about procedures and scheduling. Fortune notes that the IOC found 180 use cases for AI at the Olympics, but they largely seemed “like nothing more than marketing gimmicks.” But others, particularly the technology used to track movements within crowds of audience members, raise serious questions about what role we expect AI to take in increased surveillance. What you’ll see on television, though, are expensive, slickly produced commercials where a woman motivates herself to train for a marathon or a guy gets really excited by an AI-generated photo of the sound a “kersploosh” makes set to Jay-Z’s “Public Service Announcement.” You’ll see a whole lot of sparkle emojis, now an industry-wide symbol representing AI that likens the technology to magic (even though the sparkles never asked to be part of this!). You’ll see Leslie Jones asking Gemini to design a gymnastics routine for her and taglines about how AI is a superpower in the palm of your hands. The AI industry has far bigger problems than a single poorly executed Google ad. It’s facing existential questions about the product’s viability and practicality, and whether it underdelivers on its promises. The latest spate of AI ad campaigns, for their part, have thus far failed to highlight how its products assist what the majority of Americans actually want to use AI for — namely, help with household chores — and instead end up showing how AI will be used for the things that most of us don’t want it to interfere with: our job prospects, our privacy, and experiences and skills that feel uniquely human. If the world already thinks of AI as menacing, wasteful, and yet another example of market overhype, these ads are only confirming our worst fears. No wonder they come off as so thoroughly insufferable.