Why So Bad, AI Ads?

There is a lot of discourse about AI-related advertising being bad, creepy, and scary. The first example is from Google, and has run during the Olympics. It’s about using Google Gemini to help a daughter write a fan letter to the hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone:

Lots of people hate it—see, for example, this article in New York Magazine entitled “Everyone Hates That Google AI Olympics Commercial”—and they hate it for obvious reasons. Why would you delegate your daughter’s desire to connect with her favorite hurdler to some random chatbot?

The second one that got people upset was for a new product called Friend, announced on Twitter with a video. Friend is a wearable gadget that you talk to and it texts you back, giving you affirmations and chatting with you. Their FAQ includes questions like: “How much does friend cost?”; “What’s included in the box?” (flashback to Brad Pitt in the movie Seven); “When will I receive my friend?” Many people mocked Friend, while others defended Friend. The defenders said the thing that must always be said: “Don’t just complain, go build something.”

These two are just the latest in a recent string of publicly despised AI marketing gambits. There’s the general churn of social ads for AI girlfriends, or with AI-generated people encouraging you to become a citizen of Portugal, or the fashion company that “hired” an “AI-enhanced team member” (modeled after an Arab woman to increase office diversity).

I think the reason that people are upset over these ads is pretty simple: The human desire to connect with others is very profound, and the desire of technology companies to interject themselves even more into that desire—either by communicating on behalf of humans, or by pretending to be human—works in the opposite direction. These technologies don’t seem to be encouraging connection as much as commoditizing it.

The “Friend” product is one of those Silicon Valley venture-funded things that someone is throwing money at to see what sticks. There are thousands of these going at any given time and this one has a very expensive URL, which made folks pay more attention. But I can’t really imagine a near-term future where millions of people buy a rubbery medallion that texts them. Maybe I’m wrong!

However, Google’s mistake is surprising and kind of profound, and unbelievably easy to fix: All they had to do was have the daughter be excited by a hurdler from another country. She could write a short fan letter, then Gemini could have translated it for them. Then show the hurdler reading the note and smiling. Instead of replacing connection, Gemini would now be enabling connection across boundaries that were previously insurmountable, showing how inspiration was international, and lots of other good things that we like ads to show us so that we can feel better about being human.

I mean, the real problem is that the entire history of human existence, from myth to romcoms, is filled with stories about people pretending to be other than they are and getting in trouble. The warnings are clear here, and the marketing department should heed them. Think about Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrano is in love with Roxane, but convinced she could never love him due to his enormous honking nose, so he courts Roxane on behalf of his doofy friend Christian. You might remember it as a comedy but it’s very sad! Roxane ends up heartbroken in multiple ways. Christian is shot. Cyrano winds up dead.

Tech can change society—think about social media or mobile phones—and how we operate, because it enables more connection. But replacing is actually not just icky but almost taboo—deeply coded into our culture, our stories, our fiction and fantasies, from the plot of Comedy of Errors through the silver morphing policeman in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, with countless examples before and after. You can, if you’re lucky, change what humans do a little—but never what we are. And it’s a waste of advertising dollars to pretend otherwise.

P.S. There should be a word for the AI startup that’s generating the most online drama for a day. Given how much unwanted web spidering AI companies do, we could call it the “scrapegoat.” Or we could call the whole discourse “scapegloating.” Okay bye.

P.P.S. The all-time best AI ad so far, in my opinion, is for “Pepperoni Hug Spot.” Watch it if you haven’t.