Google pulls AI ad for Olympics following backlash

Google has pulled an Olympics ad for its chatbot Gemini from airwaves following backlash for the way it depicts a little girl using artificial intelligence to write a fan letter.

The ad, titled “Dear Sydney,” showed a girl’s dad prompting the AI chatbot to help write a letter to her favorite athlete, U.S. hurdler and sprinter Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. Google launched Gemini, formerly known as Bard, last year following the surge in popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is,” the father said in the ad, prompting Gemini. The commercial then briefly shows the draft Gemini produced and closes with footage of the little girl running on the track with a text overlay that says, “A little help from Gemini.”

The ad is still viewable on YouTube but has been taken off the airwaves, where it was repeatedly shown in the first week of the Games.

A Google spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC that, “While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we have decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation.”

Google said it still sees the Gemini app as helping to provide a “starting point” for writing ideas.

“We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it,” the statement said. “Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA.”

Google previously defended the ad. However, backlash continued to gain steam as people accused the company of encouraging the use of automation instead of authenticity, particularly with children.

“I flatly reject the future that Google is advertising,” Shelly Palmer, professor of advanced media at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, wrote in a widely circulated blog post. The technology presents a “monocultural future where we see fewer and fewer examples of original human thoughts,” she wrote.

Google is not the only company facing criticism for ads that promote replacing creative tasks with AI.

In a recent commercial, Apple showed a hydraulic press machine crushing music instruments and paint cans to reveal its new iPad Pro. The company ended up apologizing and pulled the ad from television.

Despite training AI models on original creative work, OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati said recently that AI will cause some creative jobs to go away, but that some of them should not have existed in the first place. Hollywood actors and unions vocally pushed back after Scarlett Johansson said OpenAI ripped off her voice for the new ChatGPT AI voice named “Sky.”

Disclosure: CNBC parent NBCUniversal owns NBC Sports and NBC Olympics. NBC Olympics is the U.S. broadcast rights holder to all Summer and Winter Games through 2032.