Google’s head of Android responds to criticism over the Gemini Olympics ad

He accepts they missed the mark but backs gen AI to help people get more done.

“Clearly the market isn’t fully ready to embrace all the changes that come with AI,” remarks Rick Osterloh, Google’s head of Android to WSJ’s Joanna Stern when she him about the tech giant’s “tone deaf” Gemini ad that ran during the Paris Olympics.

The ad showed a father using the tech giant’s generative AI called Gemini to write a letter to his daughter’s idol, track athlete Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.

Also Read: Google’s Olympics ad for AI is under fire; but is the heat justified?

Viewers were upset seeing AI take over a very human and treasured skill – writing. They also felt the father should have sat down with his daughter to write the letter and not go to a generative AI.

"The father in the video is not encouraging his daughter to learn to express herself. Instead of guiding her to use her own words and communicate authentically, he is teaching her to rely on AI for this critical human skill... Google should be ashamed of this messaging," wrote Shelly Palmer, professor of advanced media at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, in a blog post.

While accepting Google missed the mark with the ad, Osterloh backed Gemini saying, "It is a powerful tool. In the past my parents would get upset with me if I did not write handwritten thank you notes to people, today I write them an email. I can do ten times more email than thank you notes.”

He is confident that over time people “will come to adopt technologies that help them get more done and be more productive and, in this case, touch more people and I think that’s what we are trying to get to with the ad. I think maybe we missed the mark with it.”