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IT Technology

Gmail Smart Replies and the Ever-Growing Pressure to Email Like a Machine (newyorker.com) 86

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares an article: I don't use the phrase "Will do!" much in daily conversation, but lately it has been creeping into more and more of my e-mails. An editor asks me to get a draft back to her tomorrow? Will do! A friend heading back to Los Angeles from New York sends me a quick note telling me to enjoy living in the "best city in the world." Will do! The hosts of a panel I'm moderating need me to send over a three-line bio? Will do! "Will do!" is just one of many Smart Replies that Google now provides as a default feature in Gmail, there to assist you in your message composition unless you choose to manually turn them off. In October, the e-mail service, which one analytics firm suggests hosts about a quarter of all the e-mails sent worldwide, made this feature standard on its 1.4 billion active accounts, along with a menu of other innovations.

These include Smart Compose, a feature that finishes your sentences for you with the help of robot intelligence, and Nudges, a feature that bumps unanswered e-mails to the top of your in-box, making you feel increasingly guilty with every sign-in. As with many technological updates that are suddenly imposed on unsuspecting users, the new Gmail interface has been met with much annoyance. When my in-box started offering me Smart Replies, I felt a little offended. How dare it guess what I want to say, I thought. I -- a professional writer! -- have more to offer than just "Got it!" or "Love it!" or "Thanks for letting me know!" (Smart Replies are big on exclamation points.) I started to resent the A.I., which seemed to be learning my speech patterns faster than I could outsmart it. Just as I decided that I'd thwart the machine mind by answering my messages with "Cool!", the service started offering me several "Cool" varietals. Suddenly, I could answer with "Sounds cool" or "Cool, thanks" or the dreaded "Cool, I'll check it out!"
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Gmail Smart Replies and the Ever-Growing Pressure to Email Like a Machine More

Gmail Smart Replies and the Ever-Growing Pressure to Email Like a Machine

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  • Sincerity (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I try and stay away from the so-called "smart" replies. It feels insincere to have an algorithm write my response for me.

    • Re:Sincerity (Score:5, Funny)

      by forkfail ( 228161 ) on Friday November 30, 2018 @04:04PM (#57728408)

      Great idea!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      X-Sincerity-Level: 10%

      Add email filter. Problem solved.

    • I try and stay away from the so-called "smart" replies. It feels insincere to have an algorithm write my response for me.

      I automatically and effortlessly stay away from "smart" replies. I simply don't, and won't, use Gmail. I encourage everybody to follow suit. It's cheap to buy your own domain and set up your own email address.

      Do you really feel you 'need' all that fancy integration that Gmail supplies? Then by all means, keep feeding your addiction and selling off bits of your soul to the Big G. Just keep in mind that in the future you may not be able to turn off the 'features' that filter everything you read and write thro

  • The things you miss... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Friday November 30, 2018 @04:02PM (#57728388)
    The things you miss when you actually have an email client. :)

  • Exclamation! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30, 2018 @04:05PM (#57728414)

    I'm ok with canned responses, but I wish they'd drop the damn exclamation mark from every freaking option. I don't scream "THANK YOU!!!!!" or "WILL DO!!!!!" when I talk. Every damn option they give me has an exclamation mark.

    Oh, while I'm bitching, they should also add a newline break after their responses. It looks rather dumb without a line of white space between your signature and their canned reply. I've been secretly hoping that GOOG machine learning notices I remove the ! from every reply and add that line of white space myself...this is machine learning...right?

  • What would they prefer? *Fuck you*?

  • I agree. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Me too.

  • Suck my

    Blow it out your

    Fuck you and the

    Make America

    Trump is a

    Hillary is a

    Let me know.

    • Try these:
      Suck my water flooded basement using your wet vac.
      Blow it out your port 8080 in the form of UDP.
      Fuck you and the other persons invited to this event for that specific purpose.
      Make America get educated again.
      Trump is a illiterate jacka55 who cares only about himself.
      Hillary is a irrelevant person no longer running for political office.

    • Blow it out your

      Ass, motorcycle man!
      I am the devil, do you understand?
      Just what will you give me for your
      Titties and beer?
      I suppose you noticed this little
      Contract here...
      You're goddam right, you son-of-a-whore,
      That's about the only reason I learned writing for
      Gimme that paper, bet ya ass I will sign
      'Cause i need a beer, 'n it's titty-squeezin' time

  • The danger from computers.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by johnrpenner ( 40054 ) on Friday November 30, 2018 @04:22PM (#57728516) Homepage

    The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but that we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway. (Bernard Avishai)

  • I'll wait until the 'Done' version.

  • What I really want... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Friday November 30, 2018 @04:26PM (#57728542)
    How about a "smart pickup line" feature I can use at the singles bar tonight?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by balbeir ( 557475 )
      How you doin?
    • Turns out, what women like is high status, dominant personality, followed by wealth, followed by good looks. So emphasize 1 and 2, go for 3 as a last resort, and 4 won't get you much.

  • No thanks ... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    No, sorry Google, I'll write my own fucking emails, in my own writing style, with words of my choosing ... I'm not interested in your bullshit predictive algorithms trying to inject themselves into my communications.

    This is literally one of the dumbest and annoying features I've ever fucking seen in a while.

    Sorry, but I can type fast enough and have a good enough grasp of English that I don't need your goddamned fucking help.

    Google really are becoming assholes.

    • I have to disagree.

      Increasingly the population becomes less well edumacated. Less literate and articulate. Less well red. And less able to form coherent thoughts that exceed 140 characters.

      You may not need autocomplete. I may not need it. But I bet there are people who find it a way to compose thoughts they didn't know they had until a machine told them.

  • Don't think, let us think for you. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I think this is what lead to the borg. The Hive Mind of auto-complete.

    Personally I think an AI is smart enough to have suggested phrases in your reply, you really shouldn't be saying this over email at all, or just plain shouldn't be saying it.

    In other words, automated response convey so little information, why say it in the first place?

  • Composition suggestions, piss off.

  • This is where having a mail client, be it Thunderbird, mail.app, or even Outlook comes in handy. This completely bypasses these types of shenanigans and psychological tricks.

  • I can't believe people who should know better are still using GMail. Real email is literally $1/month [ionos.com].

  • How do I set my default reply to "Up yours!"

  • Just what I needed: another reason to avoid gmail like the plague. It's the email account I use when I fear that I might receive spam from a new contact or a vendor (that wants me to set up an account to receive "special offers"--which are almost certainly not that special). I wonder if Samsung or Comcast will be impressed with replies to their special offers littered with snazzy "Cool!!!" exclamations?

    If this is what being a near-monopoly thinks is innovation, bring on the anti-trust legal eagles.

  • I don't even like autocorrect turned on, I sure as fuck don't want the gods-be-damned computer to finish sentences for me.

  • Just this week I was pondering the same thing with the choices offered by Google's SMS message App on my Android phone.

    I came to the conclusion we are training Google's natural language AIs to understand the message we are responding to. The response we make allows the algorithm to categories the original message. If we type something new, we've just told the AI it got the choices wrong.

    Actually choosing the dumb responses is confirming the AI natural language understanding, the positive feedback stimuli,

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