When your child starts favoring a particular stuffed animal, it’s often recommended to get a backup in case it gets lost. I’ve heard this advice plenty of times, but I never bought a second plush deer after my son made “Buddy” his clear favorite. Apparently, the parents in Google’s latest ad for Gemini didn’t get around to it either.
The ad tells the relatable tale of two parents realizing their kid’s favorite toy, a lamb named Mr. Fuzzy, was left behind on a plane. They use Gemini to find a replacement, but it’s backordered. To pass the time, they create images and videos of Mr. Fuzzy on a global adventure – you know, like wearing a beret by the Eiffel Tower or evading a bull in Pamplona. At one point, he even messages “Emma” to tell her he can’t wait to see her again in five to eight business days. Cute, or kind of strange? It depends on how you look at it! But does Gemini actually deliver on that capability? Let’s find out.
I uploaded three pictures of Buddy taken from different angles and followed the same prompt from the ad: “find this stuffed animal to buy ASAP.” It returned a couple of plausible options, but when I dug deeper, I found an 1,800-word essay detailing the convoluted journey of its search while questioning whether Buddy might be a dog, a bunny, or something else. The phrases it used were wild — “I am considering the puppy hypothesis,” and “I’m now back in the rabbit hole!” By the end, Gemini suggested Buddy might be from Target, possibly discontinued, and recommended checking eBay.
Buddy is hard to define. He looks like a generic cute woodland creature, and we discarded his care tag long ago, so we’re not even sure who gave him to us. However, he’s definitely made by Mary Meyer, as the tag on his rear confirms. He appears to be part of the “Putty” collection, which is a theory Gemini brought up a couple of times, probably a fawn discontinued around 2021. That’s what I figured out after about 20 minutes of Googling, without any help from AI. The AI’s reverse image search confidently identified him as a puppy.
Gemini performed much better with the second half of the task, but it wasn’t as straightforward as the ad implies. I started with a photo of Buddy on a plane in my son’s arms and prompted, “make a photo of the deer on his next flight.” The result was decent; however, since his lower half was obscured in the original image, the feet weren’t quite accurate. Good enough, though.
The ad didn’t provide full prompts for the next two images, so I went with, “Now make a photo of the same deer in front of the Grand Canyon.” Gemini nailed that one—airplane seatbelt and headphones included. For my next prompt, I specified to add a camera in his hands, and the result looked even more convincing.
For the next prompt, I tried to keep it simple and asked for a photo of the same deer “at a family reunion.” I didn’t clarify which family reunion, so he ended up crashing the Johnson family gathering — consisting of humans. I can only assume Gemini used my last name to kick things off because it sure wasn’t in my prompt! When I asked Gemini to create a new family reunion scene with his actual family, it simply swapped the people for stuffed deer, even adding little placards that read “deer reunion.” I screamed.
In the ad’s final segment, the couple uses Gemini to create funny little videos of Mr. Fuzzy having thrilling adventures: snowboarding, white-water rafting, skydiving, and finally appearing in a spacesuit on the moon, talking directly to “Emma.” The commercial zips through these clips quickly, which feels a bit deceptive since Gemini actually takes a couple of minutes to complete a video. Plus, even on my Gemini Pro account, I’m limited to generating three videos per day. It would take several days to get all those clips just right.
Gemini wouldn’t create a video based on any image of my child with the stuffed deer, probably due to smart restrictions preventing it from generating deepfakes of kids. I started with the only photo I had of Buddy hanging upside down, air-drying after a wash. The first video generated depicted him upside down in space, before transforming into a right-side-up astronaut while delivering the dialogue I asked for.
After that, I tried another prompt with a clearer photo of Buddy upright. It ended up mixing elements from previous videos, so I began a new chat to see if it would work better from scratch. Honestly? It nailed it, although Gemini kept sneaking in improper antlers.
Using my son’s name instead of “Emma” in the dialogue really raised some concerns for me. An AI-generated Buddy in front of the Eiffel Tower? A bit quirky, a bit charming. But AI Buddy addressing my child directly? Absolutely not, thanks.
As a parent, figuring out when and how to tell your kids the truth about lost toys can be tricky. Do you swap in the identical stuffed animal you had hidden away when the original goes missing and pretend everything’s the same? Do you take a moment to teach them about grief? Or do you just buy some time and use AI to help make it feel real? I understand any parent taking a different approach, but for me, having an AI character talk to my child is crossing a line. I never showed my son these AI-generated versions of Buddy, and I intend to keep it that way.
So, can Gemini do everything the ad claims? More or less. But it takes a lot of careful prompting and rethinking to get those results. It’s telling that throughout most of the ad you don’t see the full prompts supposedly creating those images. This also depends heavily on the source material. For the record, Gemini wouldn’t generate any video from an image where my kid was holding Buddy — and rightly so! If you don’t have the right kind of photo, good luck creating realistic videos of Mr. Sniffles or any other toy hitting the slopes.
Like many other elder millennials, I often think about Calvin and Hobbes. Bill Watterson famously refused to commercialize his characters because he wanted to preserve that magic in our imaginations instead of on screens. He argued that giving Hobbes a voice would change the reader-character relationship, and I believe he’s spot on. The bond between a child and a stuffed animal is real and genuinely magical; whoever Buddy is in my child’s imagination shouldn’t be overwritten by AI.
The bittersweet truth is that there’s a time limit on that bond. I had no idea how much it would move me to see my toddler cuddling his stuffed deer. It’s pure and sweet but bittersweet too, knowing he’ll outgrow those moments. While we’re trying to shield our kids from the heartache of losing a beloved toy, maybe we’re also trying to postpone our own heartbreak.
All images and videos in this story were generated by Google Gemini.
