AI execs may be too out of touch to build for the general public

Former Yahoo CEO and early Google engineer Marissa Mayer is catching a lot of flack for how she uses AI. In an interview about her new app Dazzle, an AI assistant that learns from your camera roll, Mayer poses what she believes is an impressive flex for the product: it helped her come up with three bullet points about her ten-year-old daughter for a birthday presentation at school, describing her as “empathetic, creative, and an animal lover.”

It’s a vague description, like a generic horoscope — it could probably describe a lot of ten-year-olds.

Some onlookers, like progressive activist Leah Greenberg, marveled that “the fact that Marissa Mayer would voluntarily disclose this to a reporter is a pretty good demonstration of how deeply the culture of Silicon Valley has diverged from the rest of humanity.”

Perhaps Mayer drew so much backlash because we have repeatedly observed sheltered billionaires suggest that we outsource childrearing — one of life’s greatest tests of patience, humility, and kindness — to a computer that is incapable of understanding human emotion.

We’ve been primed for this frustration. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bored Ape owner and late night host Jimmy Fallon on national television, “I cannot imagine … figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.” The public didn’t love that comment, either, but Altman wasn’t phased by the negative feedback. A few months ago, he said on X that a “cool use case” of ChatGPT Work would be creating a podcast that talks about your kids’ upcoming birthdays or soccer games and “explain[s] your kids’ interests.” (He was brutally ratioed with comments like, “What if you just talked to your children?”)

These leaders seem to write off the naysayers as part of a small, angry fringe group. Yet a Pew Research Center study reports that 50% of U.S. adults think that AI will reduce people’s ability to form meaningful relationships. Only 5% of respondents said AI would make it easier to build these connections.