Classrooms as Places of Beauty

Why Google's Sydney McLaughlin Commercial Sucks So Much

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about two commercials:

1. Google’s Olympic Commercial

2. “Friend”

Both of these have gotten a lot of press coverage and ire. So, I’m not going to go over everything wrong with these products, which ranges from the “problems” they are trying to solve to the cringey details.

Instead, I want to think about what we can take away from them.

What do they mean for the classroom?

As I go, I’ll mull over an idea: What if we structured our classrooms around the beauty of human creation?

The Commercials

In case you haven’t seen the commercials yet, I will embed each of them here, along with some commentary.

If you know them well, feel free to skip.

This is the commercial Google aired during the Olympics:

The commercial stoked so much anger that they needed to disable comments on YouTube.

Basically, a young girl (the biggest fan of Sydney McLaughlin, who is one of my favorite athletes) wants to write a fan letter McLaughlin. Instead of having the girl write it herself, the Dad outsources the writing to Google Gemini because it needs to be “perfect.”

As Kyle Orland of Art Technica puts it, this fundamentally outsources emotion. Or as I’ll emphasize, it ignores the beauty of human creation.

If I ever become as famous as McLaughlin (I know it won’t happen, but please humor me), I will value a clumsy letter written by a child about 1,000,000x more than a perfectly worded letter written with ChatGPT.

I don’t think that will change.

Now, here’s another commercial that aired recently. It’s for an AI product called “Friend.”

The previous example addressed the “problem” of a young girl wanting to write her her idol with AI. This one takes on friendship.

As the commercial makes abundantly clear, the benefit here is that we’ll never be alone. Marc Watkins has argued that this kind of tool (along with increasingly realistic AI voices) could change human interaction.

In the commercial too, they take sideways swipes at beauty—specifically, at the beauty of humans in the natural world and the beauty of human relationships.

There's a lot. So, let’s just focus on these 2:

It’s a new relationship. She has taken him to the rooftop, one of her favorite spots.

Her: I’ve never brought anyone else. I mean, besides her.

Him: She goes everywhere with you, right?

Her: Hmm, mm.

Him: I guess I must be doing something right, then.

Her: I guess so. We’ll see.

Two things:

1. He reminds her of her “Friend,” reinforcing the idea (lest she forget!) that this AI pennant is with her everywhere she goes. She’s inured to its presence. He is not.

2. He uses the “Friend” as a model for his own action. He’s been brought into the sacred circle that, previously, only included her and her AI companion.

The commercial swaps out the beauties of solitude (the example of the woman walking in the wilderness) and of human relationships, arguing that it’s far preferable to never be alone.

The Beauty of Human Creation

I don’t believe these commercials are accidents. I don’t think they are just one-offs, or examples of marketing gone wrong.

I think they speak to the AI industry’s difficulty with the beauty of human creation. They push the idea (as myopic as it might be) that what matters is the product.

As long as something is well-written or looks beautiful, that’s all that matters. We can categorize it as “art” and move on. Don’t worry about the process.

I think they’ll find that the truth is much more complicated. There’s an enduring beauty in having something created by a human without AI.

Now…please forgive me…but I want to make a somewhat abstract point.

Why is it so fun to watch Bob Ross paint?

I’ve never watched him with paintbrush in hand. I have very little desire to paint, in general. And as tutorials, they are sort of rubbish: he moves way too fast for me to find them remotely useful.

Yet, I’ll watch them. And love them. In fact, the video above has 47 million views.

I suspect this is because it’s still an undeniable joy to watch humans create things. I still get chills watching someone paint like Jackson Pollock. I’ll put my sons’ paintings and pictures on the fridge. I’m not sure if I’ll ever do the same with their Midjourney creations.

The Classroom

Maybe this is the role of the classroom in an world filled with these technologies. Maybe this is our chance to think about how to preserve the beauty of human solitude, friendship, and creation. Maybe this gives us a model for moving forward.

I mean, in some ways, that’s what we’ve been driving at for a while.

That’s why I teach Literature. It’s about understanding the beauty and the nuance of something human-created.

That’s why I’ll listen to the new Taylor Swift album. (Don’t judge me. She’s a low-key genius. And this is her most underrated song.)

Now, this might change. And for sure, there is a lot of nuance here. It’s possible to use AI in a way that honors the beauty and value of human creation.

But I suspect that the AI industry will have some trouble grappling with those ideas. The words of the day are efficiency and ease. In pursuit of those two ideals, we run the risk of flattening out the human experience.

The classroom (college and otherwise) should be a place of un-flattening (a word?) that very same experience.

We need to put the beauty of humanity front and center.

So, I’ll leave off with some questions:

1. What would that look like?

2. How can we do that?

3. Does this force us to reimagine what we’ve been doing?

Please feel free to DM me or comment below! I wrote this in a blind fury this morning, and now I need to step away and get on with my day.