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I don’t know if you’ve read The New York Times article about Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo, who’s now back with a woman-targeted AI assistant called “Dazzle,” or heard about the ensuing brouhaha, so if not, let me summarize:
The piece starts off with Mayer explaining the wonders of Dazzle by way of an example. Mayer needed to create a slideshow about her 10-year-old daughter with a bullet-point list of three things that made her child special.
“But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers,” according to the article, so she turned to Dazzle, which spat out that her daughter was “empathetic, creative and an animal lover.”
Perfect, she thought.
Dazzle also helped Mayer design a themed birthday party for her teenage son - a glow-in-the-dark pool party - and even found neon pool toys and party favors she could buy.
“A lot of what excites me is taking something that used to take you hours or minutes, and now getting it done in seconds,” said Mayer, originally famous for taking just two weeks of maternity leave while at Yahoo.
I mean, look, there are lots of problems with this, so it’s tough to know where to begin. But let me start with this:
How incredibly sad.
It’s not that Mayer is trying to design AI for women, who apparently aren’t using it as much as men do. It’s not even that Mayer is finding uses for AI in her own life to demonstrate its usefulness for other women.
It’s just that what we’re being told we should offload - the emotional labor that requires an AI assistant - is the type of thing that sort of makes life worth living or that doesn’t need to be done in the first place.
It can be tricky when a teacher asks you to create a presentation or answer questions about your child, I suppose. It feels like a task, and if you’re as busy as most parents are, there are too many tasks to complete in the day.
But one of my chief joys in life, something I actually have to stop myself from continuing once I start, is talking about how wonderful my kids are. I could brag all day, every day, and a presentation that I am assuming Mayer’s teacher intended to show to the class, or at least Mayer’s daughter, is a chance to tell her own child what she loves about her.
This is not a task to hand to a digital assistant. This is a task to relish.
Not only is this way of using AI kind of embarrassing, but it also communicates to your kid (and to yourself) that the appearance of knowing her was more important than actually knowing her.
Whatever “mistakes” Mayer was worried about making? Well, so what if she had made them? What if she’d gone on too long, included more than three bullet points, or overlooked one detail in service of something else that stuck out in her brain? So. What.
What test did Mayer think was worth cheating on?
Same with the pool party.
Parents do not need to stress over which elaborate theme will be used for their teenager’s birthday party. I mean, maybe insanely rich kids whose parents are the former CEO of Yahoo expect them to. Maybe the friends of these insanely rich kids are also insanely rich and have insanely rich themed birthday parties and the parents are worried that their kids will feel slightly less insanely rich if their birthday party is simply “birthday themed.”
But in the real world - the one you and I live in, the one where we’re trying to get through the day and week and month and year and where groceries are more expensive every day, and health care is complex and hard to get and expensive once you do get it - in that world, it is far more important to raise a self-sufficient teenager than one with a creatively themed birthday party.