Can Marissa Mayer, Yahoo's Former CEO, Help Fix A.I.'S Gender Problem?

nytimes.com

5 points·slowin··4 comments

> Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers. So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer. “It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

Yikes.

I use AI on far more than I should. But there are some things that AI can't know. It doesn't know my kids. It doesn't know my spouse. It's just a tool, after all.

At my kids' school we have a ceremony where the dads give their kids a rock with a particular word on it. I spent several days trying to find the right word for my son. But when I found it... well every time I see that rock on my kid's shelf it makes me feel warm. It was 100% the right choice.

It can be really enticing to just simply offload that decision somewhere else. There is no "cost" in making the decision so you can't feel bad if it wasn't 100% right. But the feeling of thinking deeply and then hitting it on the head is a sensation that AI just replicate.

Looks like this was pulled out of context/proportion a little bit

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/10/26/mayer-dazzle

This doesn't make it any better. She's using AI to describe her own child instead of doing it herself. Doing it to "hype her startup" may actually be even worse.

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