Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/08/05/google-withdraws-its-heartcooling-dear-sydney-ai-ad.html
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“Heartcooling” 
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Good parenting: Helping your child learn to do something themselves.
Poor parenting: Insisting on doing the thing for them because they’ll just screw it up.
WTAF parenting: Stopping them from doing the thing so you can have a fucking machine do it instead.
This is like a parent seeing their child trying to draw a unicorn, snatching away their crayons, asking ChatGPT to draw a unicorn for them and slapping the resulting printout on the refrigerator. “See? THAT’s how you draw a unicorn, kid. Nothing you create could ever be as good as that!”
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Translation: I don’t know how to talk nicely and sincerely to others, so please write me something that sounds like i care.
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The thing that strikes me as baffling is how this ad so dramatically cuts against the “don’t worry, ‘AI’ will just take care of boring stuff so you can focus on what’s important” cover story(or, not entirely unlikely, it was made by people who consider dealing with their pesky broodlings to be irksome boilerplate getting in the way of interesting projects like trying to be a thought leader on linkedin).
It sees like a safe bet that Team Techbro doesn’t actually want to free us from drudgery so that we can pursue creativity and fulfillment; rather than downsizing who they can and squeezing the remainder harder while substituting expensive human contact for marginally adequate bot spew; but spending olympic broadcast ad money to say the quiet part out loud is crazy.
(edit: potentially related paper ‘The findings of the study indicated that the inclusion of the “Artificial Intelligence” term in descriptions of products and services decreases purchase intention’)
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Obligatory reference, Isaac Asimov, 1956 “Someday”
Even in Second Foundation he had Arkady dictate the actual content leaving the AI only to clean up the layout.
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Jesus Christ.
You know, I can almost see the utility of using AI to send mundane, repetitive work emails.
But using it for a FAN letter? From someone else? GTFO. Like, what the fuck were they thinking?? What marketer high on their own farts thought this was a good idea?
I layout a Shadow fanzine, and there has been some discussion of using some AI art filler, and we had one person submit works that I called out as AI. I have been pretty vehement that we don’t use it. This is a FANZINE for and by FANS. AI can’t possibly be a fan. I would rather have a badly drawn figure by a fan than a slick looking AI art. Thus far we have used one small element for a specific article, but it won’t be something we make a habit of.
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About the most useful thing AI is doing right now is exposing how sick and inhuman some people have become via what they believe the technology should be used for.
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Yeah, this is as bad as using AI to write blog posts, or write songs.
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I bet they put “ad ideas including Olympic athletes and AI” into ChatGPT. A parent using AI to help their kid write a fan letter is exactly the kind of r/totallynotrobots idea an AI would produce.
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Or makeding interesting replies to above comment forthwidth.
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Another safe bet is that Team Techbro can’t even distinguish between real art and marginally adequate bot spew.
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That’s not fair.
The successful techbros know that it’s real art if their wealth management team says that the tax implications of ensuring that it is stored in the Geneva Freeport are worth considering; while the lower-order techbros know that real art is on the blockchain.
It’s a depraved and degenerate culture; but it has heuristics and rules of assignment.
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The kid doesn’t really read the letter; realizing this, Syndey won’t really read it and have her AI read it for her. Eventually it becomes an episode of Star Trek: A Taste of Armageddon - Wikipedia
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This is really sad. Ordinary people may have no tutored eloquence but their words come from the heart and you can feel that quality.
Like Hayao Miyazaki said, “AI is an insult to life.”
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Just take it a step further and have the AI talk to one another
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… who would do such a thing 
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