The “perfect” answer from AI? Ex-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer faces flak after asking chatbot to describe daughter’s features | Today’s news
Marissa Mayer, the former chief executive officer (CEO) of Yahoo and the first female engineer at Google, is facing massive backlash for using an artificial intelligence chatbot to describe her 10-year-old daughter’s characteristics.
According to the New York Post, before Mayer’s daughter’s 10th birthday, her school asked Mayer to provide three bullet points describing the girl’s personality. Mayer turned to Dazzle, an AI tool developed by her startup, for help, which drew criticism on social media.
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The 51-year-old said the chatbot described her daughter as “empathetic, creative and an animal lover” – a response she described as “perfect”. She initially said she sought AI help because she felt overwhelmed by the “range and complexity of potential answers.”
Social media users are criticizing Mayer
Mayer’s revelation that she had used the tool to create a description with three adjectives sparked a widespread response online.
Users on X mocked her for using the tool, openly acknowledged it, and then featured the incident in her company’s promotional material.
“Wow, I don’t think he even knows his own daughter if he thinks this is perfect,” wrote one Reddit user. “It describes a normal 10-year-old.
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“I hope that kid doesn’t read this stupid post about how her mom doesn’t say anything about her, but I know my mom can write a whole essay about me,” said another.
“Are you really that clueless and shallow? How embarrassing,” someone else wrote, while another simply said: “this is so bleak.”
Mayer responds to the backlash
Mayer later reached out to X to clarify that she didn’t use the tool simply because she felt overwhelmed by the task. Instead, she wanted to test an early prototype developed by her team.
“No, my daughter’s school asked me to give 3 bullet points. Every parent knows that’s impossible – I could write 80 pages. What was amazing about Dazzle was that she described it perfectly AND brought examples of projects she did at nursery (playground) to illustrate. It just shows how much context there is in your photos,” she said.
She explained that her daughter Marielle’s fourth grade teachers emailed her about creating a picture celebrating Marielle and her twin Sylvana for their birthdays on December 10. Mayer said she put the email into Dazzle to test its capabilities, expecting it to struggle because facial recognition technology often can’t tell the difference between identical twins.
“So when the 4th grade teachers of Marielle and her twin sister Sylvana emailed to ask for a picture celebrating each girl’s December 10th birthday, I put the email into Dazzle to test her limits. I fully expected her to struggle since most facial recognition can’t even tell my identical twins apart.”
“Instead, Dazzle amazed me. Not only did it differentiate Marielle from Sylvanas, but it also brought up forgotten kindergarten projects (like the ‘snake denomizer’ and the ‘sand cat playground’) and connected them to who Marielle is today. I combined Dazzle’s observations with a few of my own and showed the picture (to her husband, Zachary Bogue). I remembered how fooled I had been. The prototype. he found them and we both marveled at what AI could unlock from our camera footage.”
