250 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Google’s new ad asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace?
The ad, which uses the tagline “A group project, but make it 1776,” depicts a barely visible Thomas Jefferson working mid-draft when he receives a nagging text from Ben Franklin, leading to a very Google-centric collaborative process. Edits are suggested in Google Docs, meetings are scheduled in Google Calendar and conducted remotely via Google Meet (with everyone in attendance obviously with their cameras off?). Then everything is finalized with an electronic signature. Cue the fireworks.
Of course, since this is an advertisement for a technology company set in 2026, AI has a role to play. The fictional founders use Google’s ‘help you visualize’ AI tool to try out different animals on the Great Seal, Gemini takes notes on a meeting, and the founders ask a chatbot for advice before denying King George III’s request to access documents.
It’s all very tongue-in-cheek (at one point Sam Adams asks “Can I have a beer?”) and the AI evangelism is relatively measured compared to many other recent ads. And unlike the infamous Google ad in which a father uses Gemini to write a fan letter to his daughter, this ad avoids any suggestion that the actual text of the Declaration of Independence would be enhanced by AI. Perhaps the most AI-oriented element of advertising is the video itself. There is a strange glow in my eyes, like an AI-generated video.
Viewer comments on YouTube and Instagram appear to be mostly positive, but you might not be surprised to learn that Bluesky’s response has been much more critical. Posters declared the commercial “creepy” and “incredibly tone-deaf,” with the AI angle being the biggest target. Many users, including even historian Angus Johnston, commented, “It’s surprising how little of this is actually AI.”
“It’s impossible, even in a corny fantasy joke, to argue that AI is a useful tool for political organizing, writing, or human collaboration,” said Johnston.
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