Anybody watching the Olympics in the past couple of weeks will have asked themselves some of the same questions.
Why can’t Snoop Dogg do play-by-play for every single event? Is it too late to devote my life to table tennis? What cocktail of drugs would give me one moment of the swimming announcers’ seemingly inexhaustible exuberance? Why aren’t Americans dominating every gun event?
Also: what’s with all these terrible commercials about artificial intelligence?
Meta blanketed NBC and the Peacock streaming platform with an ad showing users giving its A.I. tool a series of instructions: help me train for a marathon, show me Little Italy in 1954, tell me how to build a treehouse, tell me what to cook with the ingredients I have in my refrigerator. The “intelligent assistant” dutifully obeys.
Google’s Olympics ad, “Dear Sydney,” promoted its Gemini A.I. chatbot. With a standard deployment of sentimental imagery and heartfelt voiceover, we meet a dad whose daughter wants to write a letter to the American track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
“I’m pretty good with words,” he says, “but this has to be just right.” So, naturally, he outsources it to Gemini, which composes the note with the perfect combination of reverence and sass. How … adorable?
Parenting-wise it is none of my business, but why couldn’t they have at least tried doing it together? Shouldn’t a fan letter be, you know, personal? Is Sydney going to be offended if a child’s note isn’t “just right”? Shouldn’t the kid save A.I. for when she needs a cover letter someday?
Google pulled “Dear Sydney” last week in response to widespread criticism. But it feels like an emperor’s-new-clothes moment for a genre of innovation that was supposed to represent humanity’s next great leap forward.
Each of these ads is doing gymnastic somersaults to explain what purpose an A.I. bot is supposed to serve. But if this technology is really going to revolutionize every industry it touches, why do the commercials for it seem so thirsty, so desperate to justify their need to exist? Shouldn’t the utility be obvious?
Theoretically, several of these tasks could have been accomplished using existing search technology. Or they would, if tech companies, Google in particular, had not let their search experiences deteriorate by prioritizing sponsored results, excluding competitors and elevating search-optimized spam — in order to manufacture, conveniently, the need for an A.I. “assistant.”
The ineptitude of A.I.’s rollout as a consumer product has been fascinating to observe, from the anecdotally amusing and/or disturbing chatbot “hallucinations” in response to mundane prompts, to the constant backtracking on the intellectual property used to “train” the machine-learning models.
Behind the scenes of the oligarchic tech companies hoping to profit from this stuff, the supply chain delivering processing chips and the vast amounts of electricity required are in chaos.
Investment capital is drying up amid signs of a bubble, prompted by the sense that the grand experiment isn’t working the way we’ve been told it was going to.
For instance, 77 percent of the employees surveyed by Upwork last month said using A.I. has increased their workloads, made them less productive and contributed to burnout — which, to be fair, is a little better than taking their jobs outright.
Just because some of the enthusiasm for A.I. has dissipated, the risks have not. In June, a group of former Google and OpenAI employees published an open letter warning about the dangers of heedless and unregulated A.I. development. (In summary: apocalypse.)
And yet, last week, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta (Facebook/Instagram) announced the company would spend $37 billion this year on A.I. projects. He said he would prefer moving too fast “rather than too late” in getting the most powerful products to the market before his competitors — exactly the sort of reckless action that has critics sounding alarm bells.
But it still remains unclear how those tools are going to make any of our lives better, or if they’re just a distraction from the scarier stuff happening behind the curtain.