Google’s cute Gemini ad is mostly honest about lying to your kid

When your kid starts showing a preference for one of their stuffed animals, you’re supposed to buy a backup in case it goes missing.

I’ve heard this advice again and again, but never got around to buying a second plush deer once “Buddy” became my son’s obvious favorite. Neither, apparently, did the parents in Google’s newest ad for Gemini.

It’s the fictional but relatable story of two parents discovering their child’s favorite stuffed toy, a lamb named Mr. Fuzzy, was left behind on an airplane. They use Gemini to track down a replacement, but the new toy is on backorder. In the meantime, they stall by using Gemini to create images and videos showing Mr. Fuzzy on a worldwide solo adventure — wearing a beret in front of the Eiffel tower, running from a bull in Pamplona, that kind of thing — plus a clip where he explains to “Emma” that he can’t wait to rejoin her in five to eight business days. Adorable, or kinda weird, depending on how you look at it! But can Gemini actually do all of that? Only one way to find out.

I fed Gemini three pictures of Buddy, our real life Mr. Fuzzy, from different angles, and gave it the same prompt that’s in the ad: “find this stuffed animal to buy ASAP.” It returned a couple of likely candidates. But when I expanded its response to show its thinking I found the full eighteen hundred word essay detailing the twists and turns of its search as it considered and reconsidered whether Buddy is a dog, a bunny, or something else. It is bananas, including real phrases like “I am considering the puppy hypothesis,” “The tag is a loop on the butt,” and “I’m now back in the rabbit hole!” By the end, Gemini kind of threw its hands up and suggested that the toy might be from Target and was likely discontinued, and that I should check eBay.

In fairness, Buddy is a little bit hard to read. His features lean generic cute woodland creature, his care tag has long since been discarded, and we’re not even 100 percent sure who gave him to us. He is, however, definitely made by Mary Meyer, per the loop on his butt. He does seem to be from the “Putty” collection, which is a path Gemini went down a couple of times, and is probably a fawn that was discontinued sometime around 2021. That’s the conclusion I came to on my own, after about 20 minutes of Googling and no help from AI. The AI blurb when I do a reverse image search on one of my photos confidently declares him to be a puppy.

Gemini did a better job with the second half of the assignment, but it wasn’t quite as easy as the ad makes it look. I started with a different photo of Buddy — one where he’s actually on a plane in my son’s arms — and gave it the next prompt: “make a photo of the deer on his next flight.” The result is pretty good, but his lower half is obscured in the source image so the feet aren’t quite right. Close enough, though.

The ad doesn’t show the full prompt for the next two photos, so I went with: “Now make a photo of the same deer in front of the Grand Canyon.” And it did just that — with the airplane seatbelt and headphones, too. I was more specific with my next prompt, added a camera in his hands, and got something more convincing.

I can see how Gemini misinterpreted my prompt. I was trying to keep it simple, and requested a photo of the same deer “at a family reunion.” I did not specify his family reunion. So that’s how he ended up crashing the Johnson family reunion — a gathering of humans. I can only assume that Gemini took my last name as a starting point here because it sure wasn’t in my prompt, and when I requested that Gemini created a new family reunion scene of his family, it just swapped the people for stuffed deer. There are even little placards on the table that say “deer reunion.” Reader, I screamed.

For the last portion of the ad, the couple use Gemini to create cute little videos of Mr. Fuzzy getting increasingly adventurous: snowboarding, white water rafting, skydiving, before finally appearing in a spacesuit on the moon addressing “Emma” directly. The commercial whips through all these clips quickly, which feels like a little sleight of hand given that Gemini takes at least a couple of minutes to create a video. And even on my Gemini Pro account, I’m limited to three generated videos per day. It would take a few days to get all of those clips right.

Gemini wouldn’t make a video based on any image of my kid holding the stuffed deer, probably thanks to some welcome guardrails preventing it from generating deepfakes of babies. I started with the only photo I had on hand of Buddy on his own: hanging upside down, air-drying after a trip through the washer. And that’s how he appears in the first clip it generated from this prompt: Temu Buddy hanging upside down in space before dropping into place, morphing into a right-side-up astronaut, and delivering the dialogue I requested.

A second prompt with a clear photo of Buddy right-side-up seemed to mash up elements of the previous video with the new one, so I started a brand new chat to see if I could get it working from scratch. Honestly? Nailed it. Aside from the antlers, which Gemini keeps sneaking in. But this clip also brought one nagging question to the forefront: should you do any of this when your kid loses a beloved toy?

I gave Buddy the same dialogue as in the commercial, using my son’s name rather than Emma. Hearing that same manufactured voice say my kid’s name out loud set alarm bells off in my head. An AI generated Buddy in front of the Eiffel Tower? Sorta weird, sorta cute. AI Buddy addressing my son by name? Nope, absolutely not, no thank you.

How much, and when, to lie to your kids is a philosophical debate you have with yourself over and over as a parent. Do you swap in the identical stuffie you had in a closet when the original goes missing and pretend it’s all the same? Do you tell them the truth and take it as an opportunity to learn about grief? Do you just need to buy yourself a little extra time before you have that conversation, and enlist AI to help you make a believable case? I wouldn’t blame any parent choosing any of the above. But personally, I draw the line at an AI character talking directly to my kid. I never showed him these AI-generated versions of Buddy, and I plan to keep it that way.

But back to the less morally complex question: can Gemini actually do all of the things that it does in the commercial? More or less. But there’s an awful lot of careful prompting and re-prompting you’d have to do to get those results. It’s telling that throughout most of the ad you don’t see the full prompt that’s supposedly generating the results on screen. A lot depends on your source material, too. Gemini wouldn’t produce any kind of video based on an image in which my kid was holding Buddy — for good reason! But this does mean that if you don’t have the right kind of photo on hand, you’re going to have a very hard time generating believable videos of Mr. Sniffles or whoever hitting the ski slopes.

Like many other elder millennials, I think about Calvin and Hobbes a lot. Bill Watterson famously refused to commercialize his characters, because he wanted to keep them alive in our imaginations rather than on a screen. He insisted that having an actor give Hobbes a voice would change the relationship between the reader and the character, and I think he’s right. The bond between a kid and a stuffed animal is real and kinda magical; whoever Buddy is in my kid’s imagination, I don’t want AI overwriting that.

The great cruelty of it all is knowing that there’s an expiration date on that relationship. When I became a parent, I wasn’t at all prepared for the way my toddler nuzzling his stuffed deer would crack my heart right open. It’s so pure and sweet, but it always makes me a little sad at the same time, knowing that the days where he looks for comfort from a stuffed animal like Buddy are numbered. He’s going to outgrow it all, and I’m not prepared for that reality. Maybe as much as we’re trying to save our kids some heartbreak over their lost companion, we’re really trying to delay ours, too.

All images and videos in this story were generated by Google Gemini.