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 was a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs from 2022-2025. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.
