Google Gemini creates Mr. Fuzzy, a shameful primer on AI fakery

I was appalled to see Google’s recent ad for its AI photo and video creation capabilities.

Picture this. You are the marketing manager for Google Gemini and you have a generous advertising budget. Gemini includes the incredible photo and video creation tools Veo and Nano Banana, which make it possible to synthesize all manner visual experiences.

What’s the best way to show that off? Well, it’s probably not a great idea to show animations of any real people, because potential customers will get upset if they see video of Robert Redford kissing Ozzy Osbourne. So . . . why not make video of an inanimate object, like a plush toy?

The result was Mr. Fuzzy’s adventure, this cute and bouncy ad about a beloved lost sheep. What could be wrong with that?

Lying to your children is now easier than ever before

How did you feel after seeing that 60 seconds of AI-generated video?

There is no disputing that it is truly amazing what you can do with these tools. But after a moment, I began to feel very queasy about this ad.

The point of the ad is that you can effortlessly create fake video and use it to convince a credulous audience, in this case a small child. The parents in this ad are willing to do anything to spare poor Emma the pain of losing her toy (and, of course, to avoid Emma’s outrage that the parents failed to protect her most-loved toy). The parents are happy to invent more and more outrageous lies and use them to convince poor Emma that Mr. Fuzzy is having an adventure, not lost forever. When a child watches a television show or you read them a story, the kid learns that these stories are fiction, not reality. But this is about Mr. Fuzzy, who’s clearly a pretty big presence in Emma’s life.

The point, made very skillfully, is that if you can so convincingly lie to your child, you could just as convincingly lie to anyone else by creating video of things that never happened. This ad was created to normalize and inspire deception. In a world where AI hallucinations and deepfakes are already blurring the distinction between truth and fakery, this is deeply troubling. Mr. Fuzzy indeed.

I might also add that the story itself is stolen. The speaker and author Scott Stratten famously told the story of Joshy the Giraffe, a beloved stuffed animal who was left behind by a family at Ritz-Carlton resort. The Ritz-Carlton staff posed Joshy in photos showing him having a wonderful time, even as they shipped Joshy back to his bereft family. Scott tells this story to demonstrate the incredible customer service of Ritz-Carlton, and it has always felt warm and charming to me. Somehow, Google’s marketers have stolen it and perverted it into a strong case for marketing with deceptive deepfakes.

About AI and ethics

If you use AI, you have a responsibility to use it responsibly. Deception is easy. That doesn’t make it right.

If you make AI tools, as Google does, your responsibility is even greater. You must resist the temptation to normalize fakery. As the tool vendor, you must become a role model for responsible ways to use AI.

And if you are in marketing, you can now deceive with an ease never before possible. Marketers already have a bad reputation for lying. Your job is to creatively counter that reputation, not confirm it.

I think Google’s marketers should be ashamed of what they did. What do you think?