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 himself in a wrestling match. Abraham must negotiate with God over the fate of Sodom.
I don’t mean to be sacrilegious, but imagine these men saying—God, wait one second, I don’t know what I am doing, let me check with AI. And imagine they did consult AI, would they—or we—be the people we are today?
There is something deeply impious and irreverent about turning away from an experience that can fundamentally change who we are. We lose something fundamental by choosing AI over awe and wonder.
Sadly, the same people hating on this commercial today will be the same people writing graduation and wedding cards to their children using AI. But to anyone who wants to resist, who wants to remain alive to the insult that is the “Dear Sydney” commercial, there are options.
To start, we must want to be strong enough to face the difficult and the unknown. When our moments come, like they came to men like Saint Joseph and Abraham, we must want to be present to them. We must be okay not knowing what to do or say but we must also be utterly unwilling to give anyone else power over shaping who we become through our response.
Second, we must work hard to fight against cliché and for a language that does justice to our unique experience of the world. Again, when our moments come, we want to have the words that speak from our still small voice, from our unique experience of the world. We don’t want to fumble with our phones or mumble platitudes.
Finally, we must realize the differences between a praise that wells up from deep sources of meaning and worth, and all the things we are being sold and told to like or hate. We must sort the genuine from the imitation and then fight with our full hearts and full minds to say thank you that we get to participate in something so overwhelming powerful.
AI has important roles to play, and its power is sure to grow. But turning to AI in moments of praise robs us of something essential to our humanity.
We must face the unknown with courage and gratitude, not with ready-made AI generated content. True power, as men, comes from being willing to face the mysterious gift of our life with wonder and a desire to praise.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
