Remember when Google wasnt just a bunch of mouth-breathers with MBAs their daddies bought for them? Pepperidge Farm® remembers.
They cant even apologize right they just pull out their "victim mentality" card like a bunch of spoiled brats. Crying about how people liked the ad in internal testing which just means the executive who thought of it showed it to his wife and she said she liked it through her vicodin haze.
I know I'm going to get a lot of hate for this, but why is everyone freaking out about this ad?
Yes, make all the jokes about "why not just send the prompt directly to the famous person" you want, but the reality is that "hidden centaurs" i.e. "people using AI who successfully convince you that they didn't" is extremely rapidly rising, and thank goodness for it! Just because Google doesn't actually make that as well as open source tools with dozens of settings to tune doesn't mean that they should get so much hate for simply showing off a feature that others will undoubtly use their product for.
If a kid sends an AI-generated letter to a celebrity and no one notices, was the outrage ever justified?
The answer should be "No", but everyone is going to freakout and bemoan the death of education and act like folks haven't been leaning on aids forever. Calculators were a huge net benefit for society, and math education which uses them meaningfully is far superior to that which doesn't. If you refuse to acknowledge that this is your childs future, all you do is risk them being left behind.
See the outcomes of folks taught statistics by hand vs with matlab/R as further evidence for "Luddites are idiots" and the same nonsense thought cliche bleeds here with the outrage caused by this ad
It’s a bad ad and Google should feel bad about it. In an age where kids are already becoming too tech-dependent, making ad as about how we can make a kid depend on tech to do one more thing is kind of dumb.
Tech dependency is only bad when it's bad content consumed with that tech.
Ipad toddlers are really only bad because of moonbug entertainment and whatever the heck this is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate. If my kid gets addicted to Minecraft, Among Us, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, or any paradox interactive map painting simulator, I know that they are much more likely have a gainful career ahead of them (assuming AI doesn't automate them away, in which case, all such thoughts are forfeit anyway). Load up 50s era cartoons onto that Ipad and I've got entertaining attention span building happening. Swap the language to french and suddenly my kids are learning a new language.
I find it absolutely disgusting how common it is on this forum to see the opinion that "the kids are too tech dependent", and advocating for taking away phones, restricting access to the internet/computers, etc.
A huge amount of these pedagogical luddites themselves only became worthy of working a high paying tech job through their own tech/screen addictions. We should celebrate them here and respect the insane ROI that such addictions provide to us as "hackers". The self-hatred and authoritarian parenting styles advocated here should leave all who witness those who hold these opinions ashamed.
And yes, the kids do have genuine "brainrot" like skibidi toilet or whatever nonsense memes they're making today. I've seen the videos that young kids watch of GTAV characters falling from buildings ad infinitum. We cannot forget the millennial MLG 420 air horn brain-rot of our own era, or the crap TV/movie brain-rot like American Pie, Borat/Bruno, or Reality TV, or the crap from the 90s like bad tabloid talk shows like Jerry Springer, or crap from the 80s designed to sell toys like Transformers, or crap beach movies from the 60/70s like Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, or literally all of Mad Magazine, or formulaic Westerns in the 50s... ?
I for one will relish in high quality entertainment with my child and won't condemn them to getting only tiny glimpses of the wonderful world of art that is within the screen. Addictions to entertainment like books, art, etc are naturally features found in the best writers, painters.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that you don't have kids.
Aside from your obsession with careers and "ROI" and such, which are simply disturbing, you obviously have no idea that the modern entertainment industry has nothing to do with what you grew up with. The amount of heavily addictive shit and outright gambling targeted at kids is simply astonishing, and makes me wonder how people programming this stuff can sleep at night. And this might blow your mind, but kids are different. Some can cope with this stuff, but many cannot. Good luck giving your kids access to Youtube thinking they'll watch Numberphile and 3blue1brown all day. Guess what: parental controls in Youtube are a joke, because Google has zero interest in kids not watching crap for hours and targeting ads at them. And it's the same with every other platform. Spotify has tons of "ASMR porn", hours of TikTok "meme videos" disguised as music videos, right-wing podcast bullshit, and all you can do is enable an "explicit content" filter because god-forbid the kid might hear the F-word in a song. All these terrible free-to-play mobile games have loot boxes or wheel of fortunes or other crap that constantly pressure kids to buy some monopoly money so they can win some stupid skin so they don't get bullied in the chat. Once you have your kid crying because of this shit, maybe you will second-guess if that is the ROI you had in mind.
> If a kid sends an AI-generated letter to a celebrity and no one notices, was the outrage ever justified?
It’s a specific instance of then ends justifying the means dilema. There’s no unambiguous answer but it’s a pretty common thing to teach kids that generally ends do not justify the means.
Stepping back though - It’s not about using tools to make work more efficient. The backlash is about the specific case of making a sincere gesture feel less sincere by having a tool do some of the work.
No one expects any level of emotional sincerity solving a maths/stats problem.
As was commonly said in the world of LD debate, "Util-is-Truthtil". Utilitarianism/Consequentualism is literally the only way humans actually act in the world, all other beliefs are delusion. Deontologists follow the Categorical Imperative only because they prefer to not live in a world without universal maxims (egoism), even if they won't directly admit to it in such language. As they also said in LD, "Kant was a C*nt" and Schopenhauer's/Stirner's critique of him on this exact point was right on the money.
> Utilitarianism/Consequentualism is literally the only way humans actually act in the world
From what I understand, both of those systems define utility/consequence in terms of the entirety of society instead of only the individual doing the action or his tribe, so I’d say very few people act according to them.
I think a lot, if not most, of the outrage due to the same reason the Apple ad raised the temperature. Both of those ads highlight the exact thing that people fear about this technology -- that it will be used to destroy things that people love and those things will be replaced with yet more crap.
To see purveyors of these systems portraying that kind of use as an actual selling point tells people that the destruction is not a side-effect, it's the goal.
Yeah I think you’re on to something. In the past, ads showed people being frustrated doing things they hate and then the solution sweeps in and everything is magically better. In the Apple ad, they literally destroy things people like and have positive connotations with.
The Apple one felt like fake Twitter outrage. I’m yet to find anyone irl who is upset about the fact they can make music and draw on an iPad.
The AI outrage is real though. I’ve met quite a few people who border on visibly angry if the topic of AI generated content comes up. You can almost see The Sims negative social penalty icon show up next to someone if you talk about AI.
The only people I see with positive thoughts on it are the sales guys at work, and even they seem to be getting soured on it now they have been put on a new tool that AI transcribes and ranks their calls.
> highlight the exact thing that people fear about this technology -- that it will be used to destroy things that people love and those things will be replaced with yet more crap.
Indeed. We might not yet die by goo, but by slop.-
I believe that the ad could have been made in a way that supports the "this is like calculators" argument, but I don't think it was.
What is the purpose of writing a letter to an athlete? Is it so the athlete gets clear and accurate information about the fact that some person thinks they are cool? No. It is a bonding moment between a parent and child, an opportunity for a child to think about what values they look up to and how those values are reflected in this athlete, and an opportunity for a child to express themselves and practice expressing themselves.
AI can help with this. Show Gemini automating a boring process that a parent has to do so they can spend time writing the letter with their kid. Make cultural and language barriers the key element of the ad and show how now somebody can easily rewrite their heartfelt letter in a language that their idol understands.
I don't doubt that a lot of the complaints are from people who didn't watch the ad at all, but still this does not feel like luddism to me. This is specifically being upset that AI is being promoted not to augment human bonding, interaction, and learning - but to replace it.
I find it so funny that all the articles about this thing are so heavy handed about what you, the reader, are supposed to think about it. The ad is cute and the tech is good tool when you're not sure what kinds of things typically go into a piece of communication. There are lots of implicit rules about what's "supposed" to go into them.
I had to write a letter of recommendation recently and had
not done one before so I did literally what happened in the commercial and had gipty write a first draft. I suddenly had a tailor-made scaffold of what the letter was supposed to look like, the expected level of
formality, and topics I should cover. I rewrote it using the LLM response as a rough guide and when I sent it out my coworkers praised "how good with words" I am. And ya'know what, I am good with words but I also have a strong voice with an informal talkative tone that is hard to shake when I need to write business-formal. But the LLM has absorbed all those rules and can help me bridge the gap.
Letters of recommendation are one of the best use cases of LLMs because they are, by definition, full of bullshit and formalism, and with very little actual content.
A fan letter, especially one from a child, is the opposite of that. That's the reason so many people find the ad appalling.
Look, appalled is a pretty strong reaction to an ad about an AI chatbot that it's hard to take seriously. That footballer who made a speech about how women need to embrace their natural roles as wives and homemakers is appalling, this is at worst "eh, it didn't land for me."
Hey look this kid used a writing assistant to write something— literally dystopian. Grammarly could have made the exact same ad. It seems that there's a group of people who are frothing at the mouth towards anything with the words AI on it and this article is one of them.
Eh, it is appalling I'd say, since it takes out the entire soul of it all. A letter written by an AI is about as touching as receiving a stock photo. And as written in the article, it removes an opportunity from the kid to practice their writing ability.
>That footballer who made a speech about how women need to embrace their natural roles as wives and homemakers is appalling, this is at worst "eh, it didn't land for me."
Did you determine that on your own or did you ask an AI to tell you?
> Letters of recommendation are one of the best use cases of LLMs because they are, by definition, full of bullshit and formalism, and with very little actual content.
That's just a poorly written letter of recommendation, then. The letters I've read that were most impactful in terms of advocating for the candidate were specific about the actions and impact of the candidate, and I've written my letters of recommendation in the same fashion.
I remember Sydney was the internal name for Bing’s AI chatbot, but it got really pissy if you pointed that out. Almost made you feel bad for the poor emotionally damaged thing.
Google spoiled this opportunity to advance society's ethical relationship with computers, in a healthy way, by offloading the father's responsibility of teaching the child relationship skills to an LLM.
* Where are the boundaries of what is appropriate? The Father is the escort for the Child, in this scenario. The child loses track of themselves throughout this process. The LLM statistically chooses how to relate to the admired Olympian. ALL the words sent to the Olympian are LLM's, there is ZERO VOICE from the child, save from what the Father types into the Gemini AI prompt.
A point of view I haven't seen expressed yet: if I was the athlete, I'd value a terribly written letter by a child above one written by the parent of a child, let alone by AI.
It's the same reason I value the handmade cards my niblings have made me. They're barely legible, objectively bad, and that's exactly what makes them special. Half the store-bought cards are pretty quickly destined for the bin, but those are staying on the mantle.
A lot of my friends are professors or lecturers at universities with "motivationally-diverse" undergraduate populations; LLM-based cheating has become so common that they often reward higher marks to poorly-written papers, just by virtue of them not having been written by *GPT et al.
It’s like the slopification of human interaction. Mass generated empty gestures which have diluted the value of everything.
It’s the effort the other person had to put in that matters, not the actual end result. If someone calls you to tell you happy birthday, thats pretty impactful. If someone clicks a button to automatically send a happy birthday message on Facebook, that’s worthless.
38 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 88.3 ms ] threadThey cant even apologize right they just pull out their "victim mentality" card like a bunch of spoiled brats. Crying about how people liked the ad in internal testing which just means the executive who thought of it showed it to his wife and she said she liked it through her vicodin haze.
PS. How long until we start on Artificial Emotional Intelligence?
Yes, make all the jokes about "why not just send the prompt directly to the famous person" you want, but the reality is that "hidden centaurs" i.e. "people using AI who successfully convince you that they didn't" is extremely rapidly rising, and thank goodness for it! Just because Google doesn't actually make that as well as open source tools with dozens of settings to tune doesn't mean that they should get so much hate for simply showing off a feature that others will undoubtly use their product for.
If a kid sends an AI-generated letter to a celebrity and no one notices, was the outrage ever justified?
The answer should be "No", but everyone is going to freakout and bemoan the death of education and act like folks haven't been leaning on aids forever. Calculators were a huge net benefit for society, and math education which uses them meaningfully is far superior to that which doesn't. If you refuse to acknowledge that this is your childs future, all you do is risk them being left behind.
See the outcomes of folks taught statistics by hand vs with matlab/R as further evidence for "Luddites are idiots" and the same nonsense thought cliche bleeds here with the outrage caused by this ad
Ipad toddlers are really only bad because of moonbug entertainment and whatever the heck this is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate. If my kid gets addicted to Minecraft, Among Us, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, or any paradox interactive map painting simulator, I know that they are much more likely have a gainful career ahead of them (assuming AI doesn't automate them away, in which case, all such thoughts are forfeit anyway). Load up 50s era cartoons onto that Ipad and I've got entertaining attention span building happening. Swap the language to french and suddenly my kids are learning a new language.
I find it absolutely disgusting how common it is on this forum to see the opinion that "the kids are too tech dependent", and advocating for taking away phones, restricting access to the internet/computers, etc.
A huge amount of these pedagogical luddites themselves only became worthy of working a high paying tech job through their own tech/screen addictions. We should celebrate them here and respect the insane ROI that such addictions provide to us as "hackers". The self-hatred and authoritarian parenting styles advocated here should leave all who witness those who hold these opinions ashamed.
And yes, the kids do have genuine "brainrot" like skibidi toilet or whatever nonsense memes they're making today. I've seen the videos that young kids watch of GTAV characters falling from buildings ad infinitum. We cannot forget the millennial MLG 420 air horn brain-rot of our own era, or the crap TV/movie brain-rot like American Pie, Borat/Bruno, or Reality TV, or the crap from the 90s like bad tabloid talk shows like Jerry Springer, or crap from the 80s designed to sell toys like Transformers, or crap beach movies from the 60/70s like Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, or literally all of Mad Magazine, or formulaic Westerns in the 50s... ?
I for one will relish in high quality entertainment with my child and won't condemn them to getting only tiny glimpses of the wonderful world of art that is within the screen. Addictions to entertainment like books, art, etc are naturally features found in the best writers, painters.
Aside from your obsession with careers and "ROI" and such, which are simply disturbing, you obviously have no idea that the modern entertainment industry has nothing to do with what you grew up with. The amount of heavily addictive shit and outright gambling targeted at kids is simply astonishing, and makes me wonder how people programming this stuff can sleep at night. And this might blow your mind, but kids are different. Some can cope with this stuff, but many cannot. Good luck giving your kids access to Youtube thinking they'll watch Numberphile and 3blue1brown all day. Guess what: parental controls in Youtube are a joke, because Google has zero interest in kids not watching crap for hours and targeting ads at them. And it's the same with every other platform. Spotify has tons of "ASMR porn", hours of TikTok "meme videos" disguised as music videos, right-wing podcast bullshit, and all you can do is enable an "explicit content" filter because god-forbid the kid might hear the F-word in a song. All these terrible free-to-play mobile games have loot boxes or wheel of fortunes or other crap that constantly pressure kids to buy some monopoly money so they can win some stupid skin so they don't get bullied in the chat. Once you have your kid crying because of this shit, maybe you will second-guess if that is the ROI you had in mind.
It’s a specific instance of then ends justifying the means dilema. There’s no unambiguous answer but it’s a pretty common thing to teach kids that generally ends do not justify the means.
Stepping back though - It’s not about using tools to make work more efficient. The backlash is about the specific case of making a sincere gesture feel less sincere by having a tool do some of the work.
No one expects any level of emotional sincerity solving a maths/stats problem.
From what I understand, both of those systems define utility/consequence in terms of the entirety of society instead of only the individual doing the action or his tribe, so I’d say very few people act according to them.
To see purveyors of these systems portraying that kind of use as an actual selling point tells people that the destruction is not a side-effect, it's the goal.
The AI outrage is real though. I’ve met quite a few people who border on visibly angry if the topic of AI generated content comes up. You can almost see The Sims negative social penalty icon show up next to someone if you talk about AI.
The only people I see with positive thoughts on it are the sales guys at work, and even they seem to be getting soured on it now they have been put on a new tool that AI transcribes and ranks their calls.
Indeed. We might not yet die by goo, but by slop.-
What is the purpose of writing a letter to an athlete? Is it so the athlete gets clear and accurate information about the fact that some person thinks they are cool? No. It is a bonding moment between a parent and child, an opportunity for a child to think about what values they look up to and how those values are reflected in this athlete, and an opportunity for a child to express themselves and practice expressing themselves.
AI can help with this. Show Gemini automating a boring process that a parent has to do so they can spend time writing the letter with their kid. Make cultural and language barriers the key element of the ad and show how now somebody can easily rewrite their heartfelt letter in a language that their idol understands.
I don't doubt that a lot of the complaints are from people who didn't watch the ad at all, but still this does not feel like luddism to me. This is specifically being upset that AI is being promoted not to augment human bonding, interaction, and learning - but to replace it.
I had to write a letter of recommendation recently and had not done one before so I did literally what happened in the commercial and had gipty write a first draft. I suddenly had a tailor-made scaffold of what the letter was supposed to look like, the expected level of formality, and topics I should cover. I rewrote it using the LLM response as a rough guide and when I sent it out my coworkers praised "how good with words" I am. And ya'know what, I am good with words but I also have a strong voice with an informal talkative tone that is hard to shake when I need to write business-formal. But the LLM has absorbed all those rules and can help me bridge the gap.
A fan letter, especially one from a child, is the opposite of that. That's the reason so many people find the ad appalling.
Hey look this kid used a writing assistant to write something— literally dystopian. Grammarly could have made the exact same ad. It seems that there's a group of people who are frothing at the mouth towards anything with the words AI on it and this article is one of them.
Did you determine that on your own or did you ask an AI to tell you?
But I guess that makes sense coming from someone who thinks the peak of human intelligence was before we used tools. /jest
That's just a poorly written letter of recommendation, then. The letters I've read that were most impactful in terms of advocating for the candidate were specific about the actions and impact of the candidate, and I've written my letters of recommendation in the same fashion.
* Where are the boundaries of what is appropriate? The Father is the escort for the Child, in this scenario. The child loses track of themselves throughout this process. The LLM statistically chooses how to relate to the admired Olympian. ALL the words sent to the Olympian are LLM's, there is ZERO VOICE from the child, save from what the Father types into the Gemini AI prompt.
* The father projects -- in the psychological sense -- his expectations on to the child @ https://youtu.be/NgtHJKn0Mck?si=3e6GEHw6tcDAA-iy&t=34
This exacerbates an unhealthy 'drowning' of the self, in favor of waiting for society to phrase that for her, via the LLM's training.
The power of words are what are being devalued. It makes what the daughter has to say worthless. It is tragic, and unethical.
My personal reality, my mood + shifting daily self-expectations, have been sour of late.
I will do as you recommend, and seek some inner clarity. (It truly does work...bless the AI makers.)
It's the same reason I value the handmade cards my niblings have made me. They're barely legible, objectively bad, and that's exactly what makes them special. Half the store-bought cards are pretty quickly destined for the bin, but those are staying on the mantle.
It’s the effort the other person had to put in that matters, not the actual end result. If someone calls you to tell you happy birthday, thats pretty impactful. If someone clicks a button to automatically send a happy birthday message on Facebook, that’s worthless.