Published August 8, 2024
If you’ve been watching the Olympics, chances are you’ve noticed the steady parade of strikingly tone-deaf AI advertisements filling the commercial breaks. One, for Google’s Gemini, features a young girl striving to imitate her idol, track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. In a voice-over, her father says that she “wants to show Sydney some love,” and asks Gemini to write a fan letter to the Olympic hurdling champion. The ad soon went viral for all the wrong reasons.
“I flatly reject the future that Google is advertising,” wrote one media scholar, 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.”
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Brad Littlejohn, Ph.D., is a Fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program, where his work focuses on helping public leaders understand the intellectual and historical foundations of our current breakdown of public trust, social cohesion, and sound governance. His research investigates shifting understandings of the nature of freedom and authority, and how a more full-orbed conception of freedom, rooted in the Christian tradition, can inform policy that respects both the dignity of the individual and the urgency of the common good. He also serves as President of the Davenant Institute.
