Former Yahoo CEO defends using AI to answer school question about her daughter

Marissa Mayer, the former Yahoo CEO and founder and CEO of Dazzle AI, is facing criticism after sharing how she used artificial intelligence to respond to a school question about what makes her daughter special. Mayer said she pasted an email from her twin daughters’ school into a newly created AI platform to test its limits. The email asked for three bullet points about what makes one of the girls special.

“I fully expected it to struggle, since most facial recognition can’t even tell my identical twins apart,” Mayer wrote in an X post on Wednesday. She had discussed Dazzle, a personal AI tool for mothers’ daily tasks, in an interview with The New York Times. The Times reported that Mayer felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of possible answers about her 10-year-old daughter, Marielle, and decided to use Dazzle. The Sunday article said the tool described Marielle as “empathetic, creative and an animal lover.”

The anecdote prompted criticism from other parents and some tech industry advocates. They objected to handing a personal parenting task to AI and raised concerns about how using the technology for family matters could affect important relationships. Harpreet Kaur, who works at Microsoft, wrote on LinkedIn: “I find it appalling and heartbreaking.” Kaur said she did not think Mayer was a bad parent, but that the episode showed where this category of technology was headed, and she was not sure she wanted to go there with AI as a parent.

Another LinkedIn user, Dylan Jones, suggested the anecdote was a marketing strategy. He wrote that parents should be able to name what makes their children amazing without needing AI to tell them, and that Mayer did not need it either. He added that she needed awareness for Dazzle AI and a New York Times article that would make a strong impact in the search for traffic.

In an article published in Fortune on Thursday, Mayer responded to the backlash, saying she “wasn’t making a conscious decision to outsource.” She said she was testing the product to see how well it handled a difficult question, and described her use of it as “an individual experience.”

In her Wednesday post on X, Mayer also said the platform had not only distinguished her twin daughters but had surfaced forgotten kindergarten projects and connected them to who Marielle is today. She said she combined the platform’s insights with her own and showed them to her husband. He was floored and asked how she remembered those details, Mayer wrote. After she told him how she had used the platform, she said, they both marvelled at what AI could unlock from their camera rolls.

Mayer clarified that she did not use Dazzle because the assignment was difficult for her. “I used it because summing up your child in a few bullets feels laughably limiting,” she wrote.