GPS made our lives easier by saving time spent tracing a map. Search engines made our lives easier by saving time spent searching for books at a library. Is artificial intelligence simply the next step in this sequence of helpful technologies? This year’s slate of Super Bowl commercials certainly tried to make the case.
Many companies treated AI like a shiny new toy, showcasing how it could be used to create commercials themselves, including one featuring a dancing duo of AI robots drinking vodka. Surely that could never come out of a human mind. But while these eye-roll-worthy AI graphics are themselves cause for concern over how companies are outsourcing human creativity in building their public image, the even more concerning message lies in the commercials that are trying to show how AI is supposed to be useful not just for the corporations, but for us, the viewers.
One ad in particular featured a mom and her young son planning the son’s new bedroom as they were moving into a new home. The sight of a mother guiding her child through the creative process, complete with gentle piano music, was clearly designed to trigger our sentimentality. And it would have been all that adorable if it weren’t for one thing inserting itself into this very personal interaction: Google’s Gemini large language model. You see, the mother and child weren’t creating their plans with pencil and paper. They were asking Google’s AI model to take images of the boy’s old bedroom and use them to plan a new bedroom in the new house.
Google’s goal with this commercial is clear: appeal to our human value of family, target our emotions, bring our guard down and then convince us that AI can help us build that vision of family rather than be a threat to it. AI, this commercial says, is no different from other, more-established technologies that have long become quintessential parts of our households and the memories made in them. After all, we wouldn’t say that something as standard as television is corrupting our family interactions. Many memories are made from gathering around the TV as a family. Why can’t AI be the same?
The difference between AI and the technologies of the past is that those technologies did rote tasks for us so that we’d have more time to apply our minds critically and creatively. Search engines helped us save time spent flipping manually through files and books so that we could spend more time actually analyzing the information. Even when they didn’t help with rote tasks, they still gave us a new form of entertainment, as with TV. Yet even these forms of entertainment didn’t directly take away from the creative parts of our lives.
But now, Google is treating even the creative task of designing your new home as something that can be outsourced to their AI platform. These companies want you to welcome AI’s take-over of creative tasks because it increases their opportunities for profit. Now that many of the rote tasks have already been covered by other technologies, finding more revenue means encroaching on human creativity. “It’ll be whatever we want it to be,” the mother said of the new house. Yet the commercial ends with a shot of their yard being realized exactly as the AI envisioned it, no human touch involved.
What really makes Google’s ad that much more audacious is the fact that it centers around a child. The commercial plays up the child’s curiosity as he is wowed by Gemini’s features, as if to say that Gemini is helping nourish his creativity. In reality, young children should be nowhere near generative AI in any form. Gemini is far more likely to kill that child’s sense of creativity and curiosity than to spark it. Maybe such a feature could be helpful for a lone adult who is far too busy with other responsibilities to spend time designing their bedroom, but for a child, this creative exploration is their whole life. To teach a child so early on that creativity can be shortcut, especially when it comes to designing something as important to them as their personal space, will have a lasting impact on their minds. Preliminary research has shown that, once students are exposed to AI suggestions, they have a harder time coming up with their own ideas.
This is likely just the beginning of a long campaign by tech companies to convince us to let AI invade our lives in new ways. Google’s ad was only one of several Super Bowl ads urging us to let AI do our thinking. Some companies instead took the self-aware route in appealing to our skepticism of AI. In one commercial, Anthropic told us to “keep thinking” while taking a jab at how competing chatbots give robotic advice on emotional matters. But viewers should be wary of even these sorts of appeals. Tech companies may be trying to lure you in by showing how they “care” about your humanity. But by having you let your guard down and feel secure in using AI, these companies likely still have the same end goal of substituting your creativity.
We will have to be prepared for all kinds of appeals — ones that target our emotions and our values such as family, and those that target even our fear of AI itself. In the meantime, the best way to resist this onslaught is to continue doing what we humans do better than any product: thinking.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
