A former Yahoo CEO is on the defensive after sharing an anecdote about using artificial intelligence to praise her daughter.
Marissa Mayer, CEO and founder of Dazzle AI, said she had pasted an email from her twin daughters’ school, asking for three bullet points about what makes one of her daughters special, into a newly created AI platform to test its limits.
“I fully expected it to struggle, since most facial recognition can’t even tell my identical twins apart,” Mayer wrote in an X post on Wednesday.
Mayer had been interviewed by the New York Times on Dazzle, a personal AI tool catered towards mothers to help with daily tasks.
The Times reported that Mayer felt overwhelmed “about the range and complexity of potential answers” to the question about her 10-year-old daughter Marielle. Mayer then decided to use Dazzle.
The AI tool then described Mayer’s daughter as “empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” the article, published on Sunday, reads.
‘Appalling and heartbreaking’
The anecdote has since received backlash from other parents and some tech industry advocates who have criticized Mayer for outsourcing a personal parental task to AI and expressed concern on how using the technology for familial tasks could impact important relationships.
“I find it appalling and heartbreaking,” reads a LinkedIn post by Harpreet Kaur, who works at Microsoft.
“I don’t think she’s a bad parent. I think she’s revealing where this category is headed and I’m not sure as a parent, I want to go there with AI.”
Dylan Jones, another LinkedIn user, suggested the anecdote was just a marketing strategy.
“Yes, sure, we should all be able to name things that make our kids so amazing. We shouldn’t need AI to tell us that,” his post reads. “And Marissa Mayer doesn’t either.”
“She does however need awareness for Dazzle AI, and she needs an NYT article that punches hard in the search for traffic,” his post continues.
In an article published on Fortune on Thursday, Mayer responded to the backlash and said she “wasn’t making a conscious decision to outsource.”
“I was making a decision to test the product to see how well it did on a difficult question,” she said.
She defended her use of the product as “an individual experience.”
‘Laughably limiting’
In her post on X, Mayer said the platform didn’t just distinguish her twin daughters but also surfaced forgotten kindergarten projects and “connected them to who Marielle is today.”
She said she combined the platform’s insights with her own and showed it to her husband.
“He was floored and asked how I remembered those details,” she wrote, adding after she told him how she used the platform, they had both “marveled at what AI can unlock from (their) camera rolls.”
She clarified in the post that she didn’t use Dazzle because the assignment was difficult for her.
“I used it because summing up your child in a few bullets feels laughably limiting,” she wrote.
