For sixty seconds during Super Bowl LX, Google Gemini managed to seem like a tool the average person might like. That’s a surprisingly rare feat, but one that many of the biggest AI companies attempted during the big game.
In a soft-spoken, emotionally textured ad titled “New Home,” a mother uses Gemini to help her young son imagine what their new house might feel like. She pulls up a photo of the empty bedroom and asks Gemini to recreate it with her son’s toys, bed, and even the dog’s bed from a photo in their current home. They decorate. They wander through a photorealistic version of the new yard, dreaming up possibilities. The tech is present, but never central.
It seems Google learned what it got so wrong during the 2024 Summer Olympics with its miscalculated “Dear Sydney” ad. That spot featured a dad asking Gemini to write a heartfelt fan letter to an Olympic athlete for his daughter. It landed with a thud. Replacing an earnest parent’s voice with AI-generated prose wasn’t clever or efficient.
The Olympics ad showed Gemini as a shortcut for human expression. The Super Bowl ad showed it as scaffolding.
Welcome to the AI Bowl
Super Bowl ads are always a strange cultural litmus test. Every year, we get a peek at what advertisers think Americans care about, and what they believe we’re ready to laugh at, cry about, or trust. In 2026, that apparently meant AI.
This year, more than 23% of Super Bowl ads involved artificial intelligence. Not just tech giants like Google or Amazon, but everyone from Anthropic to TurboTax found a way to shoehorn AI into their creative pitch. Some did it with wit. Others leaned hard on emotional pull.
The big AI players opted for sentimentality over spectacle. Anthropic took a shot at OpenAI’s new plans to serve ads by mocking algorithmic overload with a scene-stealing grandma. Amazon’s Alexa+ ad starred Chris Hemsworth and played like a buddy comedy. Even the TurboTax ad managed to slide AI into a punchline about finding human help after too much chatbot confusion.
Google’s attempt felt less like a push against its rivals and more like an effort to reach people who don’t care about AI at all. Since Google has been racing to catch up in AI mindshare after OpenAI leapfrogged it with ChatGPT, it has shown remarkable confidence and restraint. And after the Olympics stumble, it was clear that Google needed to recalibrate how people think about using AI tools.
Sentiment with clarity
Every second costs a fortune in a Super Bowl ad, but Google may get its money’s worth with “New Home” if it resonates with the average person. Though arguably a little too neat, the feeling behind it is at least easy to empathize with. And it works here because the technology being sold isn’t a search engine or a Pixel phone, but the idea about how AI, specifically Gemini, should fit into everyday life.
The Olympics ad misfired by acting like AI could do the feeling for us. This one succeeds because it knows better. I’m not saying it will work. There’s a little underlying cynicism that might be off-putting. But there are times when people want a little help that AI can offer, and the ad doesn’t throw it in your face.
Plenty of ads this year tried to show AI as friendly, useful, and accessible. Google’s made it feel normal. And making AI feel normal is one of the hardest things to do, and one that most companies struggle with. When people hear about generative AI, they still think of scary deepfakes or fake Drake songs or layoffs or hallucinated facts. It’s hard to ask people to let AI into their homes when so much of what they see in the news is framed as loss.
Google’s ad doesn’t address any of that directly. But it offers a different kind of counterargument. Not It says, here’s how this could help you get through something, not by doing it for you, but by helping you do it more clearly, more playfully, and maybe with a little less stress. Because it might turn out that what people want from AI isn’t to be amazed. It’s to feel a little more at home with whatever comes next.
Sentiment with clarity
There’s a deeper shift underway here, one that trademark law can’t resolve. As synthetic media becomes easier and more convincing, the question of ownership becomes not just legal but cultural. If people expect to be able to remix and regenerate anything, then the law alone won’t be enough to stop them. There will need to be new norms, new taboos, and new expectations around consent.
McConaughey’s line is clear: if you want to use his voice, ask him. That shouldn’t be controversial. Consent and attribution are low bars, and yet they’re absent in much of today’s AI landscape. Most AI voice tools don’t tell users where the source material came from. M
In some ways, McConaughey’s actions set a precedent. If a famous phrase or moment can be legally protected, maybe yours can too. If not through trademark, then through pressure on platforms to flag synthetic content, on lawmakers to draft modern regulations, and on AI developers to build with consent in mind. The truth is, most people won’t have the means to file lawsuits every time their face appears in an unauthorized AI video. But maybe they shouldn’t have to.
We need a broader shift in how synthetic identity is treated, including penalties for violating consent. We’re all walking toward an uncertain era where the most persuasive versions of ourselves might not even be ours.
This era demands new legal constructs, regulatory clarity, and international cooperation to govern how AI can use and reuse personal identity. Without that, celebrities might end up fighting a series of narrow battles without winning the larger war. And even someone who just likes to upload videos of themselves telling stories could find their voice snatched away without their permission to sell a product they’ve never heard of. And that’s not alright, alright, alright.
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