When I was growing up, there was nothing I loved better than having my nose jammed in a book. My allowance, such as it was, went to Nancy Drews, which were disappointingly short when one was a voracious consumer. I read my dad's Louis L'Amour paperbacks from the bookcase in the back hall, The Wind in the Willows, The Narnia series, Island of the Blue Dolphins - whatever I could get my hands on. By third grade, I was obnoxious about it. I had to shut down a teacher who challenged me concerning a choice I wanted to borrow with a "tell me what you just read" quiz by doing exactly that.

I didn't have any more problems checking books out of our little school library.

My parents, bless their hearts, made sure books were always gifts as well—for Christmas, birthdays, and surprises out of nowhere.

The magic of words.

I loved to write, too - scribble in all disciplines, really. I guess that's a natural enough transition from loving to read and reading so widely.

Daddy was an unabashed poet. I still find yellow legal pad pages covered in penciled stanzas of his ever-so-precise boarding school script. I treasure them.

I taught my much younger little brothers how to read while playing school in the basement on dreary New Jersey winter days. They have always been mass consumers of printed works and are such wonderfully talented wordsmiths themselves.

Our little family has continued that tradition of sharing our love of reading and writing. When major dad was off to the First Gulf War and Ebola* was all of eight and so worried about his dad, we spent the next long months on the couch together. I read to him every single night. Thanks to Saddam Hussein, we had enough time to get through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. 

I made sure every character had their own voice, and I hate Tom Bombadil to this day.

"You can skip those songs, Mommy." 

He's such a good kid.

Books can make amazing memories. Reading expands a child's mind like nothing else does and helps them form their own coherent thoughts when first learning to express themselves on paper.

In a perfect world, even young, they've read many different voices. That variety helps them develop their own voice when creating a written piece and when composing a piece containing different thoughts.

That doesn't happen overnight, of course. It takes time to ripen, mature, find your expressive self. And you'll be always tweaking it and enjoying flexing those creative muscles. It's such a nice break outside of those times when you have to write a certain way for school or work or whatever the task.

Developing your own voice is key - your OWN. That special way which belongs to you, alone.

That's why an ad Google whipped up for the Olympics struck so many people the wrong way. 

The premise is cute enough.

A dad adores his daughter, who works hard to be a great track runner and aspires to the Olympics herself one day. This little girl admires one of our USA track athletes, and her dad asks Google AI to help his daughter write a fan letter to the track star.

Whoa. Asks...what?

Hang on a cotton-pickin' minute there.

...The ad, titled “Dear Sydney,” showed a girl’s dad prompting the AI chatbot to help write a letter to her favorite athlete, U.S. hurdler and sprinter Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. Google launched Gemini, formerly known as Bard, last year following the surge in popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is,” the father said in the ad, prompting Gemini. The commercial then briefly shows the draft Gemini produced and closes with footage of the little girl running on the track with a text overlay that says, “A little help from Gemini.”

Couldn't the dad just get a piece of paper, a pen, and help her himself...if she needed it at all? What does he need AI for?

The backlash was pretty instantaneous and rightfully so.

...A parent’s most important job is to educate their children. The father in the video is not encouraging his daughter to learn to express herself. Instead of guiding her to use her own words and communicate authentically, he is teaching her to rely on AI for this critical human skill.

The idea that the father is so insecure with his own language skills that he believes AI will do a better job, “I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right,” makes me sad. Google should be ashamed of this messaging. And just to fuel the flames – why did Google reinforce the stereotype of a minority parent being undereducated and insecure about their communicative skills? Everything about the premise of this commercial makes my blood boil.

It mirrors a conversation I had with one of my dearest friends on earth, who's also a college professor. We were discussing AI and her students. She said universities do have some capability to detect AI in papers, much like they do plagiarism, but the temptation is so huge to use it it's going to become a serious problem.

I told her my biggest fear about AI is that those who rely on it would never develop their own voice. That would be a tragedy - to go through life parroting words put out for you and never being able to use creative communication skills you've honed and grown that make you uniquely you.

 I find myself in complete agreement with the article's author.

...If this approach to communication becomes widespread (and Google is saying it will work hard to make it so), it will lead to a future dominated by homogenized modes of expression – a monocultural future where we see fewer and fewer examples of original human thoughts. As more and more people rely on AI to generate their content, it is easy to imagine a future where the richness of human language and culture erode.

We are creating...no. We are allowing the Borg to be created.

"This ad makes me want to throw a sledgehammer into the television every time I see it," @petridishes writes. https://t.co/pH60WVJJbk pic.twitter.com/66gqQBoUbt

— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) August 2, 2024

Dollars to donuts Google is completely flummoxed about why they caught so much hell that they had to pull the ad for their beautiful, helpful, dystopian product.

Google pulling its terrible A.I. Olympics ad the same week that weird "Friend" necklace debuted affirms my belief every tech company needs a Normal Person on retainer whose sole job is to say "Nobody is going to like this" when they want to do dumb thingshttps://t.co/nVm6JS12gc

— Connor Toole (@CTooleSaysStuff) August 2, 2024

Let kids think for themselves.

Where do the next great writers - or really bad ones - come from if there aren't imaginations that have been stretched during childhood doing the writing?

Maybe that's the idea, huh?

I really don't like their world at all.

* Our son was one of the very first computer and gaming savants in the early 90s, winning tournaments and designing "skins" for games not long after AL Gore invented the innerwebs. Unfortunately, he also had a knack for catching the first viruses. One was so virulent that it wiped his computer and all of my work and required one of his father's computer geeks to come from base with a DoD program to finally exterminate it. His uncle Bingley nicknamed him "Ebola," and it has been his nom-de-innerwebs ever since.