mcc
Google Mail / "GMail" has no fewer than nine settings for "Smart Features and Personalization", e.g., Gemini. I have these all turned off in order to prevent Gemini ingesting my emails. To do this, you now have to opt out of benign machine-learning or even pattern-matching-based features, like sorting promotional emails from regular ones or spellcheck.
Despite this, as of today, Google is offering a Gemini smart compose feature on all my emails, despite me having turned off smart compose.
GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)
@mcc argh
allison
@mcc the sparkle emoji now means "I do not care about the concept of consent"
mcc
Now one *assumes* these buttons don't activate unless pressed, but there's a problem. First, the checkbox to disable "Gemini" in Messages itself only turned off an activate-on-select button. Second, on a phone— where "scroll" and "tap" are both taps— accidental activation of buttons is a part of life.
This happens to me again and again, with Google, with Copilot in VS Code, with everything. A company adds an "AI"-branded feature with an off switch, you turn it off, they later enable it anyway.
mcc
The repeated lesson here is that a company, organization, computer program, or person who uses the privacy, environmental, and trust disaster sold as "generative AI" for one thing, can no longer be trusted for any thing. If it is tolerated for one thing, it will eventually be used for all things. If a program adds an optional "AI"-branded feature you *have* to stop using that program completely, because if (when) the company feels the use metrics are too low they will stop making it optional.
mcc
Related, consider the Android "Messages" app. This has checkbox settings for "Smart Reply"; two additional checkboxes for "suggestions" of stickers and "actions"; and a fourth checkbox, "Gemini in Messages", for explicitly turning off Gemini. I have turned off all of these. Despite this, this week I discovered that if I long-press or open ANY image in Messages, there are two buttons, "Remix" and "Create", which Google's documentation explicitly says network-sends the image to, quote, "Gemini".
Jerry Lundström :catjam:
@mcc I still have the Gemini icon in Gmail App for my company while I have Gemini disabled for the whole organization 🙃
Even reported it, ofc they don't really care
Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸
@mcc So, for example, if someone you know uses ChatGPT to look up the name of a drummer in a band from the 1980s, you won't be friends with them anymore?
JP
@mcc playing the odds like "if we make this feature like 80% of our UI, our engagement % starts looking *really* good"
Rich Felker
@jplebreton @mcc All this shit behavior is fueled by engagement metrics that shouldn't exist in the first place.
JP
@mcc the most juiced KPIs in history, perhaps
mcc
@jplebreton what kills me is that the Gmail Gemini button is *literally directly underneath* where the smart compose button would be if it were enabled. So there's a "I'll write it for you" button and in case you missed it a second, smaller "I'll write it for you" button underneath.
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