AI execs may be too out of touch to build for the general public

Silicon Valley leaders’ enthusiasm for AI personal assistants may reveal a gap between their priorities and the public’s. Marissa Mayer promoted Dazzle, an app that draws on a user’s camera roll, by describing how it generated three traits for her daughter’s school birthday presentation. Critics found the result generic and questioned the idea of relying on AI to interpret a child. Mayer later said she was testing the prototype, which had surfaced old projects as evidence of her daughter’s creativity, but also described using AI to plan playdates, vacations, birthday themes, and Halloween costumes. Sam Altman has similarly praised ChatGPT for helping with newborn care and suggested it could explain children’s interests.

The deeper concern is that technology executives treat human connection as a problem to optimize or outsource. Mark Zuckerberg has argued that people want more friends than they have and predicted wider acceptance of AI therapists and romantic partners. Yet a Pew survey found that half of U.S. adults expect AI to weaken people’s ability to form meaningful relationships, while only 5% think it will help. The criticism is not simply resistance to new tools: it challenges an efficiency-focused mindset that suits engineering but misunderstands relationships. Human bonds are complicated and require attention, patience, and effort; delegating those interactions to software risks losing the very experiences that make them meaningful.