Enlarge / The Gemini prompt box in the "Dear Sydney" ad. (credit: Google)

Have you seen Google's "Dear Sydney" ad? The one where a young girl wants to write a fan letter to Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone? To which the girl's dad responds that he is "pretty good with words but this has to be just right"? And so, to be just right, he suggests that the daughter get Google's Gemini AI to write a first draft of the letter?

If you're watching the Olympics, you have undoubtedly seen it—because the ad has been everywhere. Until today. After a string of negative commentary about the ad's dystopian implications, Google has pulled the "Dear Sydney" ad from TV. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, the company said, "While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we have decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation."

The backlash was similar to that against Apple's recent ad in which an enormous hydraulic press crushed TVs, musical instruments, record players, paint cans, sculptures, and even emoji into… the newest model of the iPad. Apple apparently wanted to show just how much creative and entertainment potential the iPad held; critics read the ad as a warning image about the destruction of human creativity in a technological age. Apple apologized soon after.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

As part of today’s blockbuster prisoner swap between the US and Russia, which freed the journalist Evan Gershkovich and several Russian opposition figures, Russia received in return a motley collection of serious criminals, including an assassin who had executed an enemy of the Russian state in the middle of Berlin.

But the Russians also got two hackers, Vladislav Klyushin and Roman Seleznev, each of whom had been convicted of major financial crimes in the US. The US government said that Klyushin “stands convicted of the most significant hacking and trading scheme in American history, and one of the largest insider trading schemes ever prosecuted.” As for Seleznev, federal prosecutors said that he has “harmed more victims and caused more financial loss than perhaps any other defendant that has appeared before the court.”

What sort of hacker do you have to be to attract the interest of the Russian state in prisoner swaps like these? Clearly, it helps to have hacked widely and caused major damage to Russia’s enemies. By bringing these two men home, Russian leadership is sending a clear message to domestic hackers: We’ve got your back.