Marissa Mayer sparks disgust after boasting she used AI to come up with three bullet points about what makes her daughter special

Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has sparked disgust online after she asked an AI tool to tell her three things about her daughter.

The 51-year-old sat down with The New York Times to talk about her new tech start up Dazzle, which is homing in on AI assistants, when she revealed her own use of the technology.

She said that late last year she was struggling to give her nine-year-old daughter’s teacher three bullet points that summarized what made her daughter special. 

Feeling overwhelmed by the options, she asked Dazzle, which spat out an answer for her in a few seconds. 

The app said her daughter is ’empathetic, creative and an animal lover.’

For that, Mayer, worth an estimated $1.4 billion, was widely critiqued on social media with some users going as far as to brand her a bad mother. 

Mayer was the first female software engineer to serve at Google, before joining Yahoo as CEO in 2012. She worked at the firm until 2017.

But her tenure failed to rescue already-declining Yahoo, with many arguing that her tone-deaf spending, poor product strategy and fostering of a toxic workplace culture ultimately led to the company’s fall.

Mayer, who faced massive criticism after Yahoo was forced to sell its core business, has been met with scrutiny again over her use of Dazzle.

‘This woman has spent next to no time with her kid. My god,’ one person posted on X.

Another person added: ‘The best case scenario is that this is a lie made up for the article.’

One other commented: ‘I hope this is an exaggeration to make for an interesting click-baity article.’ 

While another said: ‘If you can’t think of 3 good things about your kid, you shouldn’t be a parent.’

The tech start up is her first push into the AI personal assistant market, with Dazzle analyzing images in users’ camera rolls to carry out tasks and make suggestions. 

The idea, according to Mayer, is that Dazzle will be able to eventually handle everyday hassles that can prove tricky. 

She said: ‘A lot of what excites me is taking something that used to take you hours or minutes, and now getting it done in seconds.’

Mayer told the outlet that one of the focuses for Dazzle is for busy women in particular in the hopes that they will adopt an AI assistant. 

Mayer said: ‘Women, this is my own bias, tend to take more photos and are more visual, and so being able to work with AI in a visual medium is fun. 

‘It essentially understands your personality, your likes, your dislikes, because it know what you think looks good.’

Mayer told the outlet that she has used it to find family activities while on a vacation in Venice, to plan a play date for one of her daughters, and to pick a theme for her son’s birthday party. 

It’s not just organizing things either, she used Dazzle to throw suggestions at her for Halloween costumes, she said. 

She hopes that Dazzle could help overburdened women who may have been reluctant to get on the AI bandwagon. 

Mayer added: ‘So much of what I see with these assistants, they’re quite technical. There’s definitely a cohort of people, probably more women than men, that are too busy for that, and it’s also extremely jargon loaded and intimidating. So we built Dazzle to be more approachable.’

The move comes at a time amongst women who are running high profile tech companies that are worried there is a gender problem with AI. 

According to the outlet, even Anthropic’s own president Daniela Amodei has raised alarms that AI is becoming a ‘tool that’s just for the guys’.

Mayer told the outlet: ‘I think gender balance will come in time, because this is a field that’s moving so quickly. I’m generally an optimist.’