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 h.