Google pulled that ad after a wave of criticism on social media.
Is the ad encouraging children to use AI instead of writing their own messages and letters? Is it an invitation to cheat in school? Does it suggest that robots are better at expressing genuine human feelings than humans are? Is having someone, or something, write your fan letters to a personal hero a cop-out? A lie?
Is the commercial “Ick!”, unethical, or just ominous?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Ethics Alarms 
It was trying so hard.
You had a black father who cares for his daughter. (Yay, positive display of black fatherhood!)
An athletic daughter. (Yay, girl power! Yay, Title 9!)
You have a female Olympian. (Yay, Olympics!)
And the black girl can’t write her own letter. (Boo, black illiteracy!)
Honestly (and seriously), it was trying to be a positive commercial in a lot of ways. And, it was successful in a lot of ways.
But, I think the problem is the product. In any context, using AI to write something “personal” is nonsensical.
It might just be that, in any context, using AI to write anything is a problem. I may not be a great writer (but I don’t think I am particularly bad either), but I do not know that I would ever use AI to write something–and certainly not a letter.
I do not know that there is a good way to market this technology.
The only problem with the ad is that you could construe it as racist because black people can’t write and are only good at physical activities. Of course that was not the intention, but race baiters gotta bait.
The problem is not the ad; the problem is the product.
-Jut
Good thoughts, Jut.
The ad tried to push AI as an “incubator” of sorts…”a little help from Gemini.” But in my opinion, one part of the path of struggle-to-success with writing is getting started on your own. As a young student, I was tasked with writing letters to friends, to my parents, or maybe to another teacher. Those were designed to get my mind to do the work that Google, in some sense, wants to supplant. The incubation of ideas, the creation of content, the ability to carry on something of a two-sided conversation in the one-sided medium of a letter…each of these must be developed in a child’s brain, much like walking and talking.
If parents “just let the computer do it”, a crucial formative step is at risk for children. The child in the advertisement is old enough to both read and write. Gemini threatens to temper both those skills. And even if a parent or teacher only allows AI to build the initial text while a child refines and completes it, still…important steps and important learning are jeopardized. The ability to edit, the ability to word-smith, the ability to critique your own “literature” are all vital, not just in writing, but in speaking as well.
Children need to learn all the skills of writing well, not just how to tell a computer what he or she wants, wait a couple of seconds for an answer, then hit “send”, all the while having given little or no thought to craft or construction or creativity.
I’m of the opinion that, other than in the medical field (where saving a child’s life may be in the balance), AI and children don’t mix.
I find the advertisement to be unethical and a very slippery slope.
Can you imagine being a teacher or professor and having to correct and grade AI generated essays. Demoralizing.
That’s an aspect I never considered.
I’m heading back into that world this fall for a semester while a friend and now-former colleague has a sabbatical. It would be bad enough if I’d really kept up with what was happening with AI. But I didn’t think I’d be in the classroom again, and AI wasn’t going to help me with my own writing projects, so I figured it was something I could let other people worry about. It’s the only part of teaching again after two years of not doing so that scares me.
I got very good at recognizing plagiarism, and since most plagiarists are lazy as well as deceitful, it was generally easy to find the original source. This is different. I can know it’s AI-generated, but it’s going to be a lot harder to prove.
Despite getting a 5 on my AP English test and getting a BA in English from a college that prides itself on teaching people how to write, I didn’t learn how to write until I taught ninth grade English for two years. Correcting one hundred and fifty two-page essays of a weekend will quickly reveal the ten most common mistakes people make in writing. I firmly believe “Good writing is good editing.” Until you learn to see and correct your mistakes, you can’t write. We need to be editing our own writing. So, to the extent students use AI programs (Grammerly?) to edit their writing, the entire enterprise of teaching writing is rendered futile. It’s as if little kids don’t learn basic arithmetic, they are simply instructed on how to use a calculator. Of course, maybe that day arrived years ago.
One of my 21 year old guitar students(just finished undergrad and off to law school), couldn’t divide 180 by 3…..
I think it’s unethical, but not for the reasons other people have offered.
Suppose Hallmark came out with a line of cards you could pick out and send to Olympians, with messages like “You represent the best of us. Good luck!” And “From one runner to another, you inspire me.”
Suppose the commercial was the father helping his daughter find just the right message for her hero.
Yes, it would be impersonal. Yes, it would not give children the chance to learn to express themselves through writing. Yes, you could argue that it’s displaying a black family as not literate enough to write a letter, if you like to play that sort of game.
But it wouldn’t be an ethics quiz.
It wouldn’t be an ethics quiz because the recipient would obviously know that it wasn’t written by the sender. There’s no deception in letting Hallmark write your sentiments for you. I, personally, am of the camp that a greeting card requires a handwritten message as well (I read Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior a dozen times as a teenager) but we don’t consider it a breech of ethics if you just sign your name.
The unethical part is the implication that the recipient won’t know that the message is not from a child, but from an AI. Google tries to skirt this by saying it’s “just getting them started,” but even there…
Suppose the recipient does read it, and is impressed that a kid was so eloquent, and takes it to the news to thank the child and draw attention to her impressive mix of genius and athleticism? That’s the sort of mix-up using AI this way is asking for, and it opens the door for more and more unethical behavior to avoid exposing embarrassing misunderstandings.
So that’s my call. Now, if we get into a habit of noting that AI was involved in any communication of this sort, we’re back in Hallmark territory. That’s tacky, but not unethical.
The only thing AI does reliably, for me, is generate images that I use for memes. I feel a sense of inspiration for a unique meme, and AI provides a low effort, copyright free way of making my vision come true. (It’s a dumb art, so the lower the effort, the better!)
Other than that, AI just seems to give me the wrong answer, but with confidence. I had trouble setting up a smart watch, and Googled how to bypass a certain setting. Google Gemini wrote, “in order to bypass this setting followed these steps [that enable the setting I didn’t want”.
Come to think of it, I use Bing image generator for memes. Google AI seems utterly useless.
I’m sure Big Tech would love for the next generation to grow up unable for compose their own thoughts in written form. Why bother trying to control the formation of our opinions when it can simply write them itself on our behalf?
Great point.
Am I the only one who noticed that the music track playing at the end (starting at about 0:45) prominently features the lyric “Who’s That Girl?” . . . ?
Well if we’re referring to who’s the author of the fan letter, I can confidently say Who That Girl Is NOT . . . she’s NOT the narrator’s daughter.
Just . . . perfect.
–Dwayne
The commercial disgusts me. Before retiring from corporate life, I was disappointed by the increasing decline in individual’s communication and critical thinking skills. I attribute this to a diminishment in teaching standards and curricula. Although cell phones can be blamed to some degree for degraded communication skills my observations were made prior to the proliferation of cell phones.
To the first five of Jack’s questions, my answer is YES! Regarding is commercial unethical or just ominous I lean toward both. The father comes across as being proud of his daughter’s athletic accomplishments. We see the daughter working on her running but not her schoolwork. Shouldn’t a child’s education come before athletics? It was when I was growing up and it still should be.
AI is here whether we like it or not. But AI is a tool. No different from a hammer, a knife, or a firearm. Tools can be used for good or evil. Using AI to compensate for a child’s poor writing skills is evil. It robs the child from developing their communication skills. It in turn robs society of a fully functioning individual. Google’s excuse is a dodge. Of course, it will be used by students to avoid doing the work.
The teaching profession has eliminated cursive training. Calculators have eliminated the need to do arithmetic calculations in people’s heads. This is needed academics say because these skills are outdated and prevent them from focusing on more important subjects. What are these important subjects? DEI and Social Justice come to mind. To me, this is not progress.
Last week we went to a local grocery store because they were having a “20% off all frozen items” sale. That’s a pretty good deal…when the store doesn’t unethically raise the frozen food prices by 30% before cutting them by 20%, but that’s for another time.
We bought $50 worth of frozen items and when the receipt was printed, the savings on those items came to $4.85. My wife pointed it out to me and we walked straight to the customer service lane, waited our turn, and presented the problem. For those of you that have come through high-school math in the last two decades: the savings should have been $10, not less than $5.
It turned that two frozen pizzas – each valued at $4 – were already on sale and therefore exempted from the “20% off”. My wife said, “Fine, but what about the rest of it?” For those of you that have come through high-school math in the last two decades: the savings should now have been $8.40, not less than $5.
The manager got involved to get things settled, and honesty compels me to tell you I felt a little bad for the small group of three other people waiting in the customer service line so we could haggle over what turned out to be $3.55. It took almost ten minutes and by then, I was more concerned about the twenty-minute drive home with $50 of frozen stuff that only stayed frozen so long.
So that’s four paragraphs of writing, telling a silly story to make my point. If people simply rely on computers for basic skills – skills like composition and basic four-operator math – they will go through life constantly cheating themselves and being cheated by whatever systems they rely on.
That grocery store – and I’ll name it: Hy-Vee – is one the larger chains in Iowa. How many people walked into those stores to get 20% off their frozen items and walked out, having instead been ripped off by the store. Of course, it’s possible that a simple software problem caused the discount to be mis-applied. Or, being more conspiratorial…Hy-Vee knows that 1) many people don’t check their receipts and 2) many younger people, even if they looked at their receipts, can’t figure out that 20% of $50 is not $4.85 without getting out their phones and using the calculator. Who’s to say that Hy-Vee doesn’t advertise a sale, then purposely welch on that sale, knowing only a handful of people will catch the problem, and like us, will just get it made right at the service counter?
In conclusion, the ability to do basic math without reliance upon electronics is just as important as writing without the help of AI. The systems you utilize will become the systems on which you depend. Use the government a lot for help? You’ll become dependent. Use calculators a lot for help? You’ll become dependent. Use AI a lot for help? You’ll become dependent.
Guess what? Use your own brain a lot for those things? You’ll become independent…and less prone to being cheated.