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Who Needs a Father When You Have Google’s Gemini?
Why the “Dear Sydney” commercial should be a wakeup call for men to do and be better
By Jeff Frank
If you are watching the Olympics, you are being subjected to Google’s “Dear Sydney” commercial, advertising its AI tool Gemini. The commercial, if you haven’t seen it, involves a daughter who loves track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, and a father going to Gemini, asking it how it can help his daughter write fan mail. The commercial, at least according to one source, is universally hated.
To understand why this commercial is evoking such strong feelings, I turn to the spiritual and civil rights leader Abraham Joshua Heschel, who teaches that one of man’s highest and most holy impulses is to praise. We don’t have to be practicing a religion to feel this impulse. In fact, many of us tune into the Olympics to be astonished and amazed by what our fellow humans can do. Families gather in gratitude for the gifts of these hardworking athletes, awed by tremendous feats of courage, athleticism, and grace.
How absolutely jarring, then, to be sold the idea that an appropriate response to our feelings of awe and gratitude is turning to artificial intelligence, asking it to teach us how to praise.
I know that people use AI to help them refine things they’ve written for business and academic purposes. People also use AI to help understand and express their feelings. But this commercial feels different. It seems a short step from this commercial and to normalizing AI in the delivery room, encouraging a new dad to turn away from gazing upon their child in wonder and in love, turning to their phone, asking: Hey Siri, what does one say and feel when one’s child is born?
Experiencing overwhelming emotions — becoming a fan, falling in love, undergoing loss and trauma, discovering a passion or a talent — offers an opening into something wild and uncontrollable. This is scary. But it is also one of those rare moments in life when we can touch something of Supreme Value and come back a changed person.
Moments like this are commonplace in the Bible. Angels come to Joseph, asking him not to break his engagement with Mary. A stranger appears and Jacob finds…
