This is no different than the Bud Lite crash and burn.
With Bud Lite, one person believed she had an authority that she didn't have and made brand decisions that were radical relative to the consumer base of the product. Her personal bias was to market Bud Lite away from "fratty" white males, and Bud Lite lost billions in the process. The woman in charge was eventually fired after several missteps in responding to the fallout.
Here we have a very visible market competition over AI that's been going on for a year between Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google. Nvidia has all the headlines, Microsoft released their CHAT-GPT/CoPilot tool, and Google is giving us this.
If it turns out that Google The Corporation spent billions of dollars at the C-level marketing their AI program and preparing investors for their product launch, while Google The Geek in the IT department was showing off to his friends with "woke" interpretations of user requests without realizing how his "toy" was being sold at the highest levels of the company, then we have another case of over-inflated ego and self-importance that lead to the destruction of the marketing implementation.
Back to the top echelons of the companies, I do believe that the Bud Light marketing leadership was aware of what was happening with the Dylan Mulvaney ads, and were caught by surprise by the fallout. With Google, however, I believe that the top-level executives often diminish the role of internal IT (even in an IT company once boards hire executives from other industries), and they were not focused on how the IT department was implementing their marketing campaigns. There was an oversight breakdown between the leadership and the projects that allowed this to happen, and it will set Google back relative to their competition.
-PJ
A reasonable theory. One does get the notion that Google is a maelstrom of leftist political weirdness. That top management has lost control is certainly plausible.