I re-created Google’s cute Gemini ad with my own kid’s stuffie, and I wish I hadn’t

📅 Last updated: December 27, 2025

When your child forms an unbreakable bond with a particular stuffed animal, seasoned parents whisper a piece of crucial advice: buy a backup. It’s a talisman against the heartbreak of a lost lovey, left behind in a restaurant booth or on an airplane seat. It’s a lesson I, like the parents in Google’s charming new Gemini advertisement, have heard repeatedly but never quite acted upon. My son’s favorite is a plush deer named Buddy. There is only one.

The Ad’s Heartwarming Promise

Google’s ad, a masterclass in relatable marketing, taps directly into this universal parental fear. It tells the story of a couple discovering their child’s beloved lamb, Mr. Fuzzy, was abandoned on a flight. In their panic, they turn to Google’s Gemini AI.

• They find a replacement, but it’s on backorder.
• To bridge the emotional gap, they use Gemini’s image and video generation tools to create whimsical pictures and clips of Mr. Fuzzy having adventures.
• These digital creations—sipping a latte, exploring space—buy time until the physical duplicate arrives.

It’s a heartwarming narrative of technology solving a very human problem.

A Personal Experiment in Replication

Inspired, and perhaps seeking a creative outlet, I decided to replicate the ad’s magic with my own son’s Buddy. I fired up an AI image generator, typed in a prompt describing the well-worn deer, and waited.

Moments later, I was staring at a pixel-perfect replica of Buddy beaming from the screen. Then another. And another. With a few more keystrokes, I sent him to the moon, had him reading a book in a tiny armchair, and placed him on a sunny beach. The technology was astounding, seamless, and profoundly unsettling. I wish I hadn’t done it.

The Eerie Reality Behind the Fantasy

The ad sells a fantasy of seamless substitution, a digital balm for a tangible loss. But my experiment revealed a more complex and eerie reality.

• The AI didn’t just create a stuffed deer; it created Buddy.
• It captured the specific wear on his left ear, the particular shade of his brown fur, the unique expression in his glass-bead eyes.
• This wasn’t generic comfort; it was replication.

And in that replication, something vital was lost while something unnerving was gained.

The Hollow Shell of a Digital Copy

What felt warm and inventive in the ad’s narrative felt hollow and invasive in my own living room.

• The real Buddy is an archive of my son’s childhood. His matted fur holds the memory of tears wiped away during thunderstorms.
• His slightly loose stitching is from being clutched too tightly on the first day of preschool.
• His presence is a physical anchor to a million quiet moments of comfort.

The AI-generated Buddy, for all its visual fidelity, is a shell. It contains no history, no emotional patina. It is a puppet, and I felt like a forger.

The Unspoken Tension

This experience highlights the central, unspoken tension in the ad and in our accelerating relationship with generative AI. Google’s narrative cleverly positions the technology as a temporary stand-in, a kind of digital “holding pattern.”

Key Takeaways

• AI replication can be unnervingly precise, capturing unique details that make a cherished object specific.
• Digital copies lack the emotional history and patina of physical objects that hold real memories.
• There is a significant gap between the marketed fantasy of AI comfort and the often hollow, invasive feeling of its actual use in personal contexts.
• This technology forces us to question what we value: the flawless digital replica or the imperfect, memory-laden original.