"... I have no empathy... I don't respect you..." chuckles Willem Dafoe. Wieden+Kennedy created Nike's "Winning isn't for everyone" ad, and the agency is no doubt loving the negative publicity. Hate really sells. Misogyny and racism don't sell as well – but give it time.

This ad would have never been approved 20 years ago. Today? Like everything, the social media world is divided 50:50 on just how great/lousy this is. Sound familiar? To me, it showcases a poverty of spirit that is both unsportsmanlike and completely antithetical to the spirit of the Olympic games. For others, it's no big deal and just says the quiet part out loud – that we're all thinking.

But are we? I'm not.

Social media is training us to be meaner. We, in turn, are being used to train AI. AI is creating a reality-buffer zone around everything making us question each other and our reality by populating the Internet with deeply faked content. It's a loop.

Even the computers can see the predictive text on the wall..

Because AI needs to be constantly fed by the emotional content of people in order to evolve into an emotional being that can interact without detection among people, it's a wildfire feeding on social media – for now. Elon Musk is training Grok with your mean tweets while Facebook's mobile app gives you an AI-generated reality buffer on both ends of interaction. You can generate posts or comments with AI, or summarize comments you haven't written or read.

This inches closer and closer to Deaddit status every day -- a social media network where all content is AI generated and we are, gratefully, free to quietly step away.

But can we get away?

AI has infiltrated social media. It's working its way into our web browsers and programs. It will soon be interwoven with your smartphone OS, so it can follow you 24:7 – eating your life to grow bigger and stronger.

Google's latest "Dear Sydney," commercial for Gemini AI imagines a young girl with an Olympic dream. Super. But when her dad muses that he's pretty good with words, but "this has to be just right," and uses generative AI to help his daughter write a fan letter to Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, I was taken aback.

So was Shelly Palmer, Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Is this tragic and creepy, or "no big deal?"

Or are we being trained to accept it as no big deal through repeated exposure at every digital crossroad on every device – followed by at least 50% of the population screaming that anyone offended is a special snowflake.

I used to look forward to the Olympics. But these two ads alone are making me enjoy the Olympics less. They are tainting the games by normalizing a world that exalts personal accomplishment over humanity, and minimizes the value of genuine feeling.