Ex-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Defends Her Mocked AI Query

Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is promoting her new AI assistant called Dazzle, and an interview with the New York Times has inadvertently made her the subject of ridicule. The piece explained that the teacher of Mayer's 10-year-old daughter asked for three bullets on what made the girl special, adding that Mayer "felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers." Thus, she turned to Dazzle. "It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover," Mayer told the Times. The former CEO "thought it was perfect." The anecdote was meant to illustrate how Dazzle can help, but instead has people scratching their heads: Mayer needed AI to describe her own daughter?

• "Surely, her daughter will appreciate learning that an AI model scraped through her mom's photos of her to come up with those because her mom couldn't be bothered," writes AJ Dellinger at Gizmodo. (Dazzle uses a person's photos to glean information.)
• The Independent and TMZ round up reaction online, with this post being typical: "When a mom needs to ask an AI assistant what's special about her 10-year-old daughter, something has gone horribly wrong!" A Substack post by Stephanie McNeal recoils at this "dystopian version of motherhood."
• Mayer explains: In a post on X, Mayer said she wanted to add context to the anecdote. "To be clear, I didn't use Dazzle because I was overwhelmed by making a slide," she wrote. "I used it because summing up your child in a few bullets feels laughably limiting." She said she could have written 80 pages and found that narrowing it down to three bullets was daunting. "What was awesome about Dazzle was that it described her perfectly AND brought back examples of projects she had done in kindergarten (sandcat playground) to illustrate it. It just shows how much context is in your photos."