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Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has come under fire for asking an AI tool her startup created to generate clues about her own daughter.
Mayer, 51, made history as the first female engineer at Google and went on to become CEO and chairman of Yahoo. She has since founded a start-up, Dazzle AI, which uses technology to analyze a phone’s camera roll to perform everyday tasks.
She had to get such a task done, as she said recently The New York Times, should come with three bullet points about her almost 10-year-old daughter, Marielle, as the young girl’s teacher asked. Those times reported that Mayer felt overwhelmed by the request — so she turned to her AI assistant.
“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer told them times, whose reporter noted that Mayer thought the response was “perfect.”
Others on the Internet, however, blasted Mayer for relying on the tool to tell her about her own daughter.
“I was just looking at the fridge door,” one person quipped at X while another said: “This is the saddest thing I’ve ever read about AI, which is saying something. This Marissa Mayer is so far gone she doesn’t even realize she should be embarrassed that she can’t just list three special things about her own daughter.
“When a mom has to ask an AI assistant what’s special about her 10-year-old daughter, something has gone terribly wrong! These tech lunatics want to expand our humanity to AI,” wrote another, while another said, “I used to respect Marissa Mayer. Now she’s bragging about how she literally can’t do 3rd grade homework without it being a good thing…
“Are you really that clueless and shallow? How embarrassing,” wrote another, while another simply said, “this is so dark.”
Mayer defended her use of AI to respond to an X user, writing: “No, I was asked by my daughter’s school to give 3 bullet points. Every parent knows this is impossible – I could write 80 pages. What was brilliant about Dazzle was that it described her perfectly AND brought back examples of projects she did in kindergarten (Sandcat playground) to illustrate how much there is, in your photos.
Talk to the times, Mayer elaborated on the potential uses for Dazzle AI. “A lot of these things, like figuring out what you want to be for Halloween, figuring out the theme for your kid’s birthday party, they should be fun, but in many cases they become such a chore and so time-consuming,” she said.
But if the times The reporter probed further to imagine a future without the friction of making the decision, Mayer replied, “I haven’t really thought that through.”
The Independent contacted Mayer for comment.
