Marissa Mayer has defended using her startup’s AI assistant to describe her own daughter, after a New York Times profile drew a wave of criticism online.

The former Yahoo chief executive told Alexandra Alter of The New York Times that her daughter’s teacher had asked for three bullet points on what made the girl special. Mayer asked Dazzle, her company’s AI assistant, instead.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer told the Times.

Users on X criticised her for handing the question to an AI, as Caitlin Hornik reported for The Independent.

Mayer’s reply

Mayer answered in a post on X on Monday. She thanked the Times for the piece and said she wanted to give more context.

Thank you to @nytimes for yesterday’s piece on Dazzle (@itsdazzleai) and for recognizing our team’s hard work. While it’s still early days, the user engagement and response so far have been terrific.

I wanted to share more context behind one anecdote in the article: my daughter Marielle’s birthday slide.

To be clear, I didn’t use Dazzle because I was overwhelmed by making a slide. I used it because summing up your child in a few bullets feels laughably limiting. And, since our team had just gotten an early prototype running, I wanted to see what deeper threads it might find.

So, when Marielle and her twin sister Sylvana’s 4th-grade teachers emailed asking for a slide celebrating each girl for their December 10th birthday, I pasted the email into Dazzle to test its limits. I fully expected it to struggle, since most facial recognition can’t even tell my identical twins apart.

Instead, Dazzle blew me away. Not only did it distinguish Marielle from Sylvana, it surfaced forgotten kindergarten projects (like the “snake denomizer” and the “sandcat playground”) and connected them to who Marielle is today. I combined Dazzle’s insights with a few of my own and showed the slide to @zackbogue. He was floored and asked how I remembered those details. I fessed up that the Dazzle prototype had found them, and we both marveled at what AI can unlock from our camera rolls.

(Pictures attached of Dazzle’s response, plus the slide I made with its insights and my own.)

The foundational paper on transformers is titled “Attention Is All You Need.” What makes photos + AI so powerful is that our camera rolls are a decades-long record of what we pay attention to. By analyzing that visual history, an AI agent can connect dots we didn’t even realize we were documenting.

A birthday slide isn’t a common case, but here are a few that have stunned Dazzle users recently:

– Personalized learning: Dazzle offered custom spelling lists and grammar concepts based on photos of a child’s schoolwork.
– Home inventory: Given a book club reading list, Dazzle found a book the user already had and noted two others by the same authors, entirely from the backgrounds of their photos.
– Design intuition: Dazzle noticed a new sofa in a user’s living room photo and recommended artwork to hang above it.
– Wardrobe suggestions: For an esoteric costume party, Dazzle recommended what the user already had in their closet and could wear, based on the clothes in their past pictures.

We take 5 billion photos a day, often wondering if we’ll ever look at them again. Now, AI can turn those snapshots into deep, personal context.

She said her daughters’ teachers had asked for a slide celebrating each girl for their birthday. Her team had just got an early prototype running, and she wanted to test its limits.

Dazzle launched in late September. It reads the photos in a user’s camera roll to answer questions, carry out tasks and make suggestions. It competes with personal AI agents such as Meta’s Muse, which has 10 million users. Mayer’s startup has 10 engineers, according to the Times.

Mayer told the Times she thinks Dazzle could appeal in particular to women.

“Women, this is my own bias, tend to take more photos and are more visual, and so being able to work with A.I. in a visual medium is fun,” she said.

She also said Dazzle works just as well for men. Some power users spend hours a day with it, she said. Alter asked whether it was depressing to imagine AI planning birthdays, gifts and family holidays.

“I haven’t really thought that through,” Mayer said.

Mayer joined Google as its 20th hire in 1999 and led search there for a decade. She ran Yahoo from 2012 to 2017. Her startup scrapped its first apps, Sunshine Contacts and Shine. The idea for Dazzle came from Shine, she told the Times.

Asked about the small number of women leading AI companies, Mayer named Fei-Fei Li, who sold World Labs to AMD. She said gender balance in tech “will come in time”.