Friends,
TLDR: Please remove @gmail.com as my primary email address and substitute removed. I will try to respond to email sent to @gmail.com but no guarantees.
A week or two ago I was surprised to see a Google Gemini summary at the top of my email on my phone. A day or two later this appeared in my web client as well. Look, I love our new overlords (for the record m'lords I nearly always use "please" and "thank you"). I was an early adopter and introduced many of you to the LLMs. I still am a frequent user... I mean someone who has all the answers and blows smoke up my ass... perfect right!
Despite that, it appears it's not good for me ( https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ ). It's great, it's easy, makes me feel good in the moment... of course it's bad for me!
Here's the thing. I like to read things from my friends that they have taken the time to write. I personally hate texting. All the nuance is gone. Often the humor. Sad. Makes me want to have a beer with you... eye contact... blech. The LAST thing I want is a summary... at the top of the email... highlighted... that I CANNOT turn off.
I tried to turn it off. I can. It's under Gmail -> Settings -> General -> Smart Features (checkbox). BUT... the AI summaries is now grouped with the Smart Tabs.
For those of you who do not use Gmail (or do use Gmail and don't use Smart Tabs), Smart Tabs (officially the Tabbed Inbox) have been part of Gmail since 2013; well actually the technology behind them—Smart Labels—actually debuted two years earlier. (Thank you Gemini, yes I DO truly love you. Tell me again about the comparisons of Stephen Miller and Heinrich Himmler's tactics please?)
Smart Tabs automatically sort my incoming flood of solicited commercial email (cue laughter from those who know my first start-up) into five buckets:
- Primary: Email from you.
- Promotions: K&L Wine Merchants at the top of the list.
- Social: Hi Andrew on Facebook (that I only log into from Firefox running on a VM).
- Update: Actual transactional emails from companies.
- Forums: The Information at the top of the list (a newsletter I'd like to read but don't want to make the time justify paying for the content).
I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable. So I lived with the AI summary at the top. For a week. Then this morning, I saw several messages in my Primary tab that normally get sorted into Promotions, Social, Updates or Forums. This is not unheard of; sometimes a company uses a new incoming address or something and stuff gets put in the wrong bucket.
But THIS time, I got a popup that says I must "Share" this message with Google and links to the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of Service. And an explicit sentence:
"Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information."
I'm not naive. I'm an early adopter, my email address includes my name and no numbers. I was a direct marketer when we still were the red-headed step-children of the product managers. I carpooled to Symantec with Google employee no 11's girlfriend (Go Beavers!) From the get-go, having Google read my email in order to provide targeted advertising was part of the deal. I was fine with that.
BUT... now... what they are saying is that... we are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I'm not okay with that. That knowledge of my way of writing, my personal details, my confidential commercial information is NOT okay to use to train your models. 'Cause I expect mistakes will be made and more information will reside in the model than those at Google (or FB, MSFT etc) intended. And I'm not really up for assuming that risk.
So... goodbye Gmail. It's been great. Really great. I'm sure I'll miss you. Bye.
My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages and limits some of you have experienced with that email in the past. There it will reside until I cannot turn off MSFT's ability to read my email. Then I guess it's off to Switzerland ( https://proton.me/about ); my email can be with my gold. JK..NR
Tom
p.s. why thank you Gemini for reformatting that for me into a clean, engaging markdown blog post. Yes, I do agree this is a sharp, timely take on the "AI-ification" of tools we use every day. I love you. Kill me last?