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

Marissa Mayer is getting dragged for the way she talks about AI, and not just because the product in question is hers. In an interview about Dazzle, her new assistant that learns from your camera roll, the former Yahoo CEO and early Google engineer presented it as a triumph that it could spit out three bullet points about her 10-year-old daughter for a school birthday presentation: empathetic, creative, and an animal lover.

That landed badly. The description sounded thin and generic, and it tapped straight into a public irritation that’s been building around tech leaders treating artificial intelligence like a substitute for ordinary human judgment. Leah Greenberg, a progressive activist, said Mayer’s willingness to share the story showed how far Silicon Valley culture has drifted from everyone else’s.

And Mayer isn’t the only one taking heat for this instinct. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman already got criticized after telling Jimmy Fallon on TV that he could not imagine raising a newborn without ChatGPT. A few months later, he suggested a “cool use case” for ChatGPT Work would be a podcast that tracks your kids’ birthdays or soccer games and explains their interests. The replies were brutal, including the obvious one: maybe talk to your children.

Mayer tried to clean it up after publication, saying on X that she wasn’t using Dazzle to explain her child to herself. She said she was testing the prototype, which surfaced forgotten kindergarten projects like a “snake devenomer” and a “sandcat playground.” But in the same interview she also talked about using AI to figure out a child’s birthday theme, plan a playdate, book family activities on vacation, and decide on a Halloween costume. She even floated the idea of her assistant coordinating with her husband’s assistant.

That is where the story stops being a one-off and starts looking like a pattern. Pew Research Center says half of U.S. adults think AI will make it harder to form meaningful relationships, while only 5% think it will make those connections easier. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg still imagines a world where AI therapists, AI romantic partners, and increasingly realistic avatars fill in for human contact. The pitch is always efficiency. The missing part is that people are not a product to optimize.