Google Pitches AI to the Founding Fathers, and America Collectively Cringes

A new Google Workspace ad imagines Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams using Gemini to draft the Declaration of Independence. The internet is not having it.

Google has released a commercial for Workspace that somehow makes the case against AI harder to ignore than any think piece ever could. The ad reimagines the drafting of the Declaration of Independence as a group project powered by Gemini. Ben Franklin texts Thomas Jefferson for a status update. Jefferson snaps a photo of his handwritten draft and asks AI to transcribe it into a Google Doc. Franklin and John Adams hop in with suggestion-mode edits. Gemini finds a meeting time, takes notes during a Google Meet call, and at the end they ask the AI whether King George III should get edit access to the final document.

The response has been swift and merciless. CUNY history professor Angus Johnston put it bluntly on Bluesky: "Even in a corny fantasy joke, it's impossible to make the case that AI is a useful tool for political organizing, writing, or human collaboration." The ad lands at a moment when public skepticism about AI's role in creative and political life is already running high, and the sight of America's revolutionary figures reduced to collaborators on a branded productivity suite has struck many as a perfect symbol of Silicon Valley's tin ear.

The commercial inadvertently makes a sharper point than Google likely intended: that the gap between how tech companies sell AI and how people actually experience it continues to widen. When even a whimsical historical fantasy can't make the product look useful for the work it purports to transform, the problem may not be the audience.

Sources: The Verge