Google ad imagines founding fathers using Gemini
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- Google launched a Google Workspace commercial tagline'd "Group project, but make it 1776," depicting Ben Franklin texting Thomas Jefferson, who uses AI to transcribe a draft into a Google Doc.
- Gemini is shown scheduling meetings, taking notes during a Google Meet call, and advising the founding fathers on whether to give King George III edit access to the Declaration of Independence.
- Nano Banana generates a United States seal featuring a turkey rather than an eagle — "probably the more honest choice," the article quips.
- Angus Johnston, a CUNY history professor, posted 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 author notes the ad never asks what Gemini would have said if the founders had queried it about women's voting rights, slavery, or Manifest Destiny — questions the founding fathers themselves failed to resolve.
- The Verge AI carried the identical "Infuriating Google commercial imagines the founding fathers embracing AI" framing, signaling cross-outlet consensus that the ad misfired.
Why it matters: Google is pitching Gemini as a collaboration tool so essential it could have helped write the Declaration of Independence, but a CUNY historian counters that AI cannot be justified for political writing or organizing — and the founding fathers' actual record on slavery and suffrage would have been a far harder prompt for Gemini to handle. The ad's framing reveals how Google's AI marketing keeps running into civic-history territory it can't honestly answer for.
