When AI generates fan mail

Okay, this will be a long one. I sacrificed my sleep over this post, so you better read the whole thing and write me some AI-generated response!

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

– Winston Churchill

Last week, I read that Google pulled an ad after some criticism before airing it during the Olympics, where a Gemini AI was used to write a fan letter. Google stated:

“We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but it can never replace it.”

The ad showed a father using AI to write a fan letter to his daughter’s favourite athlete, Olympic track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. You can see the video on YouTube. I didn’t want to embed the iframe, sorry for the extra hop.

Takeaways

After watching the ad, these were my key takeaways:

• A fictional story from a father’s point of view about his aspiring young daughter idolising Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
• AI giving tips on how to teach hurdle technique.
• AI composing a fan letter with some guidance from the father.
• No true evidence that the young aspiring girl is a fan of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.

Perspective

As a father myself, I know how proud we dads are of our little ones; spending time together means the world. But what is wrong with using AI to generate a fan letter? Surely, she is too young to write a full-blown essay about how inspiring Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone is to her. Does this make her less of a fan? No. Obviously, Google needs to sell AI, but at the same time, even if your intentions are good, there is a general notion that everything AI is bad.

On the other hand, how genuine are fan mail responses? Most famous celebrities have management teams that handle fan mail. More fans mean more revenue from sold merchandise, books, TV deals, and tickets. Can we be 100% certain that these management teams don’t use AI? How impersonal is it for famous people not to respond to fan mail personally? Is it even humanly possible for celebrities to personally read and respond to every single fan letter?

To that end, does it really matter that some percentage of fan mail is generated by AI? Has a fan-written letter ever completely changed someone’s life after reading it? Maybe, I don’t know. But we are living in a dystopian world where having synthetic interactions is becoming the new normal.

Criticism

Critics like Linda Holmes, host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, and Shelley Palmer, a professor at Syracuse University, voiced concerns. Holmes wrote, “Who wants an AI-written fan letter?” Palmer warned of a “monocultural future where original human thoughts become increasingly rare.” All I know is that AI is here to stay, and we need to evolve our thinking and perception of what genuine human thoughts even mean.

Surely, if the ad had shown a hand-drawn picture of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone attached to the AI-generated letter, it would have been okay; we would let it slide this time. Or maybe we should expect meaningful, poetic, prolific essays from young fans? I would be more heartbroken knowing that the fake response I got from my idol was not a genuine response, even if it came with a photo and an autograph. Knowing that a heartfelt letter to an idol was never actually read would be devastating. But this is why we humans have imagination; we believe our made-up stories. We want to believe that our idols do read our letters. Our idols read them and personally respond with a thoughtful signed photo, which gives us motivation for whatever it is we dream to achieve.

Concluding thoughts

Labeling content as “generated by AI” would suffice, but would it? But obviously, “Who wants an AI-written fan letter?” Right? NOBODY! Who wants an AI-written recruiter reach-out letter? NOBODY! Does this mean that recruiters will suddenly stop using AI to generate reach-out letters? NO!

It’s down to ethics and whether it will be accepted by general consensus.

People can have their opinions and their lofty, unrealistic standards, but not everything is as straightforward as it might seem.

We need to accept that every communication bit might be AI-enhanced, and there’s no sure way of telling otherwise. Receiving a fan letter, whether written or enhanced by AI, is still meaningful to some point, at least from the sender’s perspective, and doesn’t make the sender less of a fan. If you want a genuine experience, go out and talk to people.