While AI isn’t bad, it does have a serious branding problem

This isn’t a new issue, but it is especially relevant, given what happened to Google and Meta earlier this week.

Google’s attempt to showcase AI’s potential backfired spectacularly. Its ad, called “Dear Sydney” aired during the Olympic Games, and featured a father using Google’s Gemini AI to help his daughter write a fan letter to her idol, Olympian track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The ad’s intent was to blend inspiration with technology, while highlighting the girl’s dream of breaking McLaughlin-Levrone’s world record.

But viewers didn’t see it that way.

Instead of being inspired, the ad missed the mark and left viewers questioning why anyone would want to replace a child’s creativity with AI. Public criticism reached such a peak that even YouTube’s comments section on the ad have been switched off. Why? It struck a chord with people who have feared AI for a while and believe that the tech will replace creativity and humanity rather than enhance peoples’ daily lives. When asked for comment about the ad, a Google spokesperson sent Digiday a statement saying the company believes AI “can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it.

“Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA,” read Google’s statement. “It showcases a real-life track enthusiast and her father, and aims to show how the Gemini app can provide a starting point, thought starter, or early draft for someone looking for ideas for their writing.”

As Jamie MacEwan, Enders Analysis pointed out, there’s a clear disconnect between what AI can offer and what makes a good advert.

“Marketers want to make AI relatable by showing it in personal and creative settings, but highlighting it in this way makes it easy to caricature as a clumsy or even destructive interloper,” he said.

Meta’s take on AI didn’t go much better. 

The tech giant shut down its AI chatbots designed to let people converse with digital versions of celebrities, according to The Information. Launched last September, these AI characters were meant to humanize the tech company’s AI efforts but failed to gain traction. The result? Meta finally pulled the plug, acknowledging the project’s failure. Commenting on this, a Meta spokesperson told Digiday, “You can no longer interact with AI characters embodied by celebrities. We took a lot of learnings from building them and Meta AI to understand how people can use AIs to connect and create in unique ways. AI Studio is an evolution, creating a space for anyone including people, creators and celebrities to create their own AI.”

Still, despite this, Meta’s CFO Susan Li’s outlook commentary for the third quarter of 2024 made it very clear that AI is still high on the company’s agenda for the foreseeable future. So much so that the team expects “significant capital expenditures growth in 2025 as we invest to support our artificial intelligence research and product development efforts”. 

The subtext here is that Meta will charge ahead into AI, missteps be damned. Eventually, people will be expected to catch up.

“The general population is still discovering what AI is good for, and platforms like Google, Meta [in this case] and OpenAI are playing a guessing game as they attempt to triangulate which use cases will resonate with individuals,” said Jeremy Hull, chief product officer at Brainlabs. “The problem? They’re each moving so fast there’s no room to gather feedback on these narratives —  which leads to instances where they miss the mark.”

And Meta, Google, and the rest will keep at it until they find a more human way to show how AI can add value to our lives. Take the Google ad, for instance. Instead of showcasing how Gemini AI could write the letter, they could have shown the child brainstorming ideas with her father, using AI as a tool for refinement.

“AI companies need to adopt a different approach that focuses on inspiring excitement about AI’s potential rather than instilling fear and anxiety in people about how it will impact messaging and advertising to all,” said Matt Crider, growth and strategy at Markacy.

The other issue is the fact that these examples, while they’re meant to be fun and playful and showcase AI’s potential, the tech itself is still unregulated, meaning there’s a huge question mark over how it should be used.

As Hull put it, the companies developing AI solutions are often preoccupied with telling stories about what it could do. But the messy reality of today is that neither platforms nor people have quite figured out what it should do. 

“The companies that are able to identify what consumers want from AI are the ones who will see the biggest success from their marketing messages,” he added.

— Digiday senior reporter Marty Swant contributed to this article.