SAN FRANCISCO — Google pulled a video advertisement it had been running prominently on Olympics coverage that showed a father using artificial intelligence to help his daughter write a letter to her sports hero, the latest example of the tech giant receiving backlash for its AI products.
The ad for Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, depicted a father proudly talking of his daughter’s ambitions in track and field. He was shown using the AI assistant to research coaching tips and then asking it to help her write a fan letter to U.S. Olympics star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
The ad aired repeatedly during NBC’s Olympics coverage, putting Google’s vision for how AI can help people in front of a massive audience during one of the biggest live events of the year. But many who saw the ad were turned off by the suggestion that AI should be used to craft a personal message that should come from the heart, posting criticism of it on social media.
“The Google AI ad during Olympics coverage is so bleak. Prevent your daughter from writing her own fan letter to her sport hero. Ugh,” Erika Hall, a design strategist and consultant, said in a post on LinkedIn. “In the fall, is it going to be ‘Have your kids generate art using AI and put that on the fridge, so they can focus on their homework instead.’”
On Friday, Google confirmed that it was rolling back the ad given the negative feedback.
“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,” Google spokesperson Alana Beale said. “While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we have decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation.”
The backlash to the ad is the latest example of Google and rival tech companies competing to commercialize AI, only to face consumer pushback on new productsand the way they’re being marketed. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have all delayed or rolled back AI products over the past year and a half after concerns about how the tools worked.
Google has used AI in its products for years, but after OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the entire tech industry has been locked in a competition to design, build and launch consumer-focused AI products. Google launched its own AI assistant last year, eventually naming it Gemini. In February, the company had to curtail Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after criticism that the tool created historically inaccurate images. And in May, Google slowed down the rollout of its AI answers in search results after the tech told some people to put glue on their pizza, among other bizarre search results.
Some critics compared Google’s AI ad to one from Apple earlier this year, which it also removed after facing online backlash. That ad showed a massive industrial compactor crushing musical instruments and art supplies into dust, suggesting that creative people only needed an Apple iPad to make art and music.
“The Apple iPad commercial and the Google Gemini AI commercial are different versions of the same thing,” Michael Miraflor, chief brand officer at the venture capital firm Hannah Grey, said in a post on X. “They both give the same feeling that something is very off, a sort of tone-deafness to the valid concerns and fears of the majority.”