Gmail's AI Summaries Now Appear Automatically (theverge.com) 39
Google has begun automatically generating AI-powered email summaries for Gmail Workspace users, eliminating the need to manually trigger the feature that has been available since last year. The company's Gemini AI will now independently determine when longer email threads or messages with multiple replies would benefit from summarization, displaying these summaries above the email content itself. The automatic summaries currently appear only on mobile devices for English-language emails and may take up to two weeks to roll out to individual accounts, with Google providing no timeline for desktop expansion or availability to non-Workspace Gmail users.
no thanks. (Score:2, Insightful)
I would like to publicly opt-out.
Thank you for respecting my wishes.
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Maybe he is THE anonymous coward? Did you really think there is more than one?
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good news! opting out of their ai carp also disables the webmail's spell-checker. You know, because don't be evil.
Ick. (Score:3)
Do not want.
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I do. I hate reading overly long emails, and especially, overly long email threads. If AI could do a reasonably good job of summarizing, I would absolutely love it.
So much for effective communication, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
So instead of teaching people to write concise, to-the-point emails, we instead let them ramble on and use AI to communicate what they really intended to say.
This doesn't solve the TLDR problem, it only makes it worse by encouraging people to waste time writing emails that others simply won't read.
Re:So much for effective communication, eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your comment reminded me of a phrase from the essay Politics and The English Language by George Orwell:
prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
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https://www.orwellfoundation.c... [orwellfoundation.com]
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How's that teaching been going? I don't think that's what schools teach these days. They want ever *longer* essays and reports. As a student, you don't get extra credit for turning in a one-paragraph essay.
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whew! (Score:2)
"saved me the trouble enabling the feature".
Aside from the word 'the', you could pretty much put ironic quotes around every word individually in that quoted sentence.
I'm sure glad google is thinking about me and my workload.
Sucks (Score:2)
The summaries are terrible, they leave out important info.
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Came here to say that. If you want to misunderstand everything sent to you, just read the summary!
I'm glad I don't use gmail...
Re: Sucks (Score:1)
Web search too. Mostly takes up screen space telling me something I already know. Occasionally wrong. Often irrelevant. Never has the detailed information I actually searched for.
Fucking waste.
Re:Sucks (Score:5, Funny)
MS's mantra (Score:5, Insightful)
Features so good they have to force people to use them.
Doesn't it seem as though the past 10+ years of software development has seen just about everything get worse?
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You realize this article is about Google, not Microsoft, right?
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Yeah, quite sure. Microsoft went *nowhere* with their phone OS, and they suck at search. Google sucks at AI and dev tools. Sure, they both have an office suite. Well, Google sort of has an office suite.
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Copilot sucks way more than Gemini. Google had a really bad start, but look at how they are catching up. ...
I guess they just have the most data
@gmail.com is the new @aol.com (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried to switch to DuckDuckGo from Google search several times since 2012 or so. Initially, it didn't take. But on the third or fourth try, it did: I've now been a DDG user for three full years, rarely using Google search except as a rare fallback. This isn't so much because DDG got incredibly better; it is more because Google search got incredibly worse.
The switch to ProtonMail was even easier. I switched to ProtonMail to Gmail in 2012, and never looked back. It is just better. In addition to the privacy features, the interface is uncluttered. As da Vinci states, "simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication" - and Proton nails that in their products.
This is a long way of saying: there are other options. It's time to ditch Gmail.
I'm now looking at people with @gmail.com the way I used to look @hotmail.com and @aol.com.
Re: @gmail.com is the new @aol.com (Score:1)
Can't disable either (Score:4, Informative)
I can't disable it, especially on my phone. Very annoying knowing I'm contributing to the climate disaster without even trying. I got rid of some of the buttons with uBlock Origin previously...
"You can ask it anything!" "Ask it to fuck off!"
What are the security implications ? (Score:3)
OK: we know that google reads every email that goes through gmail; I kind of assumed that that was to work out what advertising it could plague the gmail user with. Does it go beyond that, building profiles that are used elsewhere such as selling to life insurance (build risk profiles). Will AI lead to further leakage ?
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Generating a summary doesn't leak anything by itself. And if they want to datamine your mail, they probably do it with the original text as they do now for ads.
God damned tech companies. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Not enough people are using this feature, therefore, we're going to turn it on automatically for them. Why? LOOK AT OUR USAGE RATES?! AMAZING!"
Fuck you, assholes. Maybe we don't want you're shitty AI summaries ruining our actual communication with colleagues and friends? Stop shoving this shit at us when we intentionally do not seek it out. If we want it, it's not hard to figure out how to enable it. If we don't turn it on? It's because we DO NOT WANT IT. Not because we didn't notice it. Not because we needed hand-held into it. DO NOT WANT is still DO NOT WANT.
New button needed (Score:2)
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To decline this, simply click the "Hell The Fuck No You Evil Spying Bastards" button.
To decline this, simply stop using Gmail. Everybody should do that; it's too bad that so few people will.
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I BLOCK these (Score:1)
That's quite the spin (Score:2)
... eliminating the need to manually trigger the feature that has been available since last year.
I translate that as "introducing the requirement to manually disable the feature that has been opt-in since last year but is now opt-out.
If you aren't paying for the service...
Google is so FOS these days. (Score:3)