Many people use AI for routine tasks like drafting emails or answering quick questions. But former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer used it for something that users on social media aren’t necessarily thrilled about.
In a New York Times interview published over the weekend, Mayer revealed that when tasked with coming up with three bullet points to summarize what made her 10-year-old daughter special, she asked AI for help.
“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative, and an animal lover,” Mayer told the New York Times.
Mayer served as Yahoo’s CEO from 2012 to 2017 and was Google’s first female engineer. She now runs an AI startup called Dazzle, which launched in September after raising $8 million in seed funding last year.
“This is so bleak”
To source the bullet points, Mayer used Dazzle AI, an AI personal assistant that relies on one’s camera roll rather than text.
While Mayer allegedly found the response perfect, users on social media are thinking otherwise, with most pointing out the bizarre or disappointing nature of offloading human emotions and parenting to an agent.
“This is so bleak,” political commentator Keith Edwards wrote on X, in a post with 1.9 million views and hundreds of comments.
Many were quick to speculate about the veracity of the anecdote, hoping it could be an exaggeration or completely made up as a way for Mayer to promote her new product.
“I hope this is an exaggeration to make for an interesting click-baity article,” one user said on X. Another added, “the best case scenario is that this is a lie made up for the article.”
Others were simply confused at the need to turn to AI for a simple task like providing three bullet points about a loved one.
One user wrote, “that’s the type of thing we expect elementary school children to be able to come up with on the fly.”
The idea of outsourcing tender parenting moments to AI has proved controversial for a while now. Two years ago, Google (where Mayer once worked) received backlash over a commercial that depicted a father using the tech to write a fan letter for his daughter. Google ultimately pulled the ad.
The continued discourse around Mayer’s anecdote on social media has since caught the attention of Mayer herself, who published a response to the backlash on X.
“To be clear, I didn’t use Dazzle because I was overwhelmed by making a slide. I used it because summing up your child in a few bullets feels laughably limiting. And, since our team had just gotten an early prototype running, I wanted to see what deeper threads it might find,” she shared on X.
Reached for comment, a Dazzle spokesperson referred Fast Company to Mayer’s post on X.
The post further explained how Mayer used Dazzle, which surfaced “forgotten kindergarten projects,” connected them with “who [her daughter] is today,” and informed the final project.
If nothing else, the anecdote and response have sparked a debate about what we risk losing when we turn over our thinking to machines.
“Bleak doesn’t begin to describe this,” one user wrote on X. “The future of our civilization depends on our continued ability to use our own brains, at least a little bit.”