Google is running a new ad during the Olympics. It’s about a cute little girl: She’s a runner, and she loves Team USA’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, a world record holder on the track who won two Olympic gold medals in 2021. The little girl wants to write her a letter. So daddy starts up an AI chatbot.

“Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone how inspiring she is,” he asks Google’s Gemini. He instructs it to add a line about how his daughter plans to break McLaughlin-Levrone’s all-time world record (and to make sure the sentence Sorry not Sorry.) The ad never shows the final letter in full, but only slides over fragments of it. The whole thing is meant to be engaging and show viewers how AI can help forge human connections and facilitate creativity.

But come on: there’s absolutely nothing right about this ad.

Isn’t a letter like this cute because it was written by a child? Shouldn’t a young person be able to examine their feelings and then express them authentically? And what about McLaughlin-Levrone? Would she be able to tell that the letter was written by AI? How would she feel about that? Would she send back her own AI-generated message, thanking the child for taking the time to write to her?

Read: The AI ​​Industry Is Stuck on One Very Specific Way to Use a Chatbot

The whole thing is bleak. It takes the feel-good cliché of a kid getting to interact with his idol and squeezes a multimillion-dollar language model between them. Google is pitching a world where even the most personal interactions are mediated by computers. The company may be making bold claims about the potential of AI to revolutionize civilization. But it can’t escape the reality that it’s co-opting the hopeful aesthetic of the Olympics, meant to celebrate human achievement, to promote a digital technology that can be used to undermine human labor.

The reaction so far has not been positive. Author Will Leitch said the ad “takes a little piece of my soul every time I see it.” Professor and media personality Shelly Palmer wrote that he “wants to scream.” On YouTube, where Google placed the ad four days ago, comments have been disabled — a step the company typically does not take on its videos, and one that signals concern about backlash.

When I reached out to Google to ask about that backlash, a spokesperson told me, “We believe AI can be a great tool to enhance human creativity, but can never replace it. Our goal was to create an authentic story that honors Team USA.” The ad, which the spokesperson said features a real father and daughter, “seeks to show how the Gemini app can provide a jumping-off point, thought starter, or first draft for someone looking for ideas for their writing.”

Google’s marketing team is having a tough time right now. The company has aggressively pursued a technology that may be eye-opening but that many remain skeptical about. AI will revolutionize everything, proponents say, but it’s unclear how. Wall Street is starting to question whether investments in the technology will actually pay off. To the extent that generative AI is present in everyday life, it’s not always on the best terms: The technology has arguably degraded once-trusted search engines, plundered human creativity and taken jobs.

In other words, reality is a far cry from the sunshine and jump ropes of the “Dear Sydney” ad. Perhaps that’s not unusual: For years, Big Tech marketing has relied on sappy montages of regular people using their tools to circumvent the very real problems of their products. Companies like Meta, TikTok, and Apple may be able to get away with this framing, since their products are ultimately about connecting people, but generative AI is more about people talking to a computer than to each other. (Apple found itself in a similar predicament earlier this year with an iPad ad that, accidentally or not, invoked the ability of AI to crush art with a machine; Apple quickly apologized and scrapped plans to air the ad on TV.)

Read: See How Apple Is Shrinking Human Culture

Google seems to have misread the moment. The Olympics are supposed to be about people accomplishing amazing feats in the physical world. While the ad ran this weekend, American surfer Caroline Marks scored a near-perfect 9.43 out of 10 after falling into the barrel of a giant wave in Tahiti. 17-year-old Canadian swimming prodigy Summer McIntosh won her first gold medal in the women’s 400-meter individual medley. And legendary gymnast Simone Biles continued to defy the laws of physics despite an injury. These athletes are indeed inspiring. We don’t need a chatbot to tell them that.