The end of an error
By 
The ad that ensured that “what a pro wants” thing wouldn’t be the worst of the year has been postmaturely euthanized by Alphabet:
If you’ve been watching the Olympics, you have inevitably been exposed to an advertisement from Google called Dear Sydney. The premise involves a father talking about his daughter, a grade-school track-and-field athlete who would like to write a fan letter to Olympian and 400-meter-hurdle world -recorder holder Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. “She wants to show Sydney some love, and I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right,” says the narrator dad.
[…]
Like many things about AI itself, this is something seemingly nobody wants. People were quite upset with the ad, which kept playing during prime time. “I flatly reject the future that Google is advertising,” wrote Syracuse media professor Shelly Palmer. “I want to live in a culturally diverse world where billions of individuals use AI to amplify their human skills, not in a world where we are used by AI pretending to be human.” Brand strategist Michael Miraflor wrote that the ad was quite similar to the Apple iPad commercial from May that was widely reviled. “They both give the same feeling that something is very off, a sort of tone-deafness to the valid concerns and fears of the majority,” he wrote, adding that both were developed in-house.
It wasn’t just the ad heads who were pissed. On Google’s YouTube channel, comments for the ad were turned off. It’s easy to imagine it was getting cooked for its uncanny tone and bad ideas. But if Google is trying to downplay the dystopian energy in the ad itself, maybe it isn’t best to silence dissent on a website that it owns. Less than a week into the Olympics, Google decided to pull the ad entirely “given the feedback,” according to a flack that spoke with The Hollywood Reporter.
At least nothing worse could happen to Google this week!
Feel free to discuss anything Olympics or for that matter antitrust related. (Except guilt-by-in-law-association arguments about Kamala Harris we’ve already seen a million times, that shit is tedious as hell.)