Former Yahoo CEO Needed AI to Help Describe What Makes Her Own Daughter Special

Marissa Mayer, the original Silicon Valley girlboss, is back with a new artificial intelligence tool specifically for moms. Specifically, moms who don’t really like doing mom stuff.

In a profile of Mayer and her new AI assistant, called Dazzle, the New York Times provided an anecdote, presumably passed on to the reporter by Mayer herself, to highlight how this agent has made her life easier—though, if anything, it shows Mayer performing the exact kind of cognitive offloading that any AI tool worth its salt should free us up to focus on rather than doing for us.

Per The Times, Mayer said that she was asked by her daughter’s teacher to come up with three things that make her daughter special as part of a celebration of her daughter’s 10th birthday. Mayer, apparently feeling overwhelmed by the task, asked Dazzle to do it for her. “It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer told the Times. Surely, her daughter will appreciate learning that an AI model scraped through her mom’s photos of her to come up with those because her mom couldn’t be bothered.

That is the catch with Dazzle—instead of asking for full access to a user’s texts, emails, and documents the way most AI agents do, Mayer’s assistant goes after a person’s photos.

“Your camera roll is the ultimate personal context,” the company explains on its landing page. “Every photo you take holds rich context about your preferences, style, hobbies, loved ones, and everyday tasks. Dazzle transforms your camera into a proactive assistant that understands you, what you need help with, and what you like.”

Communicating with the AI agent works the same way. Instead of typing a prompt and getting a response, Dazzle has users snap a photo as the starting point and lets the agent point to what it thinks the next course of action should be. “Snap a picture of a purchase you’ve been thinking about, a flat tire, or fridge ingredients, and Dazzle buys on approval, schedules repairs, or suggests recipes,” the company says.

That’s… fine? It’s unclear that it’s fundamentally different from most AI assistants, which also can snag information from an image, but Mayer’s whole schtick seems to be “AI for women,” and by her estimation, photos are more girly while text prompts are for boys. “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,” Mayer told the Times.

Mayer isn’t wrong that women have basically been left behind by AI. The vast majority of people who built the technology are men, imposing their biases—consciously and unconsciously—onto everything from the training data to how AI models communicate and how people interact with them. Studies have shown that AI models have a gender bias problem, producing misogynistic and sexist outputs, and women have thus far been less likely to engage with AI than men.

But the solution surely isn’t a pink coat of paint and a girlypop attitude. At one point in the Times piece, the publication suggests that “maybe what overextended professional women need is an A.I. wife, an emotional labor bot.” And…you see the problem here, right? That in trying to address a problem in part created by gender biases, we are leaning into those very same misogynistic tropes and saying the woman (or woman-shaped bots) should do emotional labor for us? Like, did we think about this for more than a second?

In the scheme of things, Dazzle is mostly just another AI tool that wants to hyper-target its users and help them buy more stuff, with little in the way of actual solutions for the kind of monotonous stuff that eats up a person’s time and energy.

If you want an AI agent to buy shoes for you because you just don’t have the energy to do it yourself, fine. But please don’t use AI to figure out what is special about your kid. You gotta do that part on your own, Marissa.