GoKawiilI go to check my email in Gmail’s web UI. I see a few new messages regarding feedback on a project I’m working on. I click through to read one of them and the first thing I’m greeted with is a message summary I didn’t ask for generated by a language model.
I focus the message box to draft a reply, but there’s already one there. It was also generated by the language model. I delete it, replacing it with my own.
Afterward, I go to compose a new message. A colorful animation steals my focus for a second highlighting a new “help me write” button. I ignore it and move on to filling in the recipients and subject line.
I focus the message body area and underneath my cursor appears the message “Press / for Help me write”. Again, I ignore it and begin writing.
A few moments later, I start a new paragraph and pause. There’s a new message under my cursor now: “ Tab to improve”. What I’ve written so far isn’t up to Gmail’s standards, it seems.
Look, I’m pretty pragmatic when it comes to generative AI features in software. I see very little wrong with including an optional AI writing assistant for those who want it.
But when you nag and nag, when you summarize my messages and write my replies without my asking, when you repeatedly interrupt me to beg and plead that I rewrite my drafts, you’re sending the wrong message.
The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails. That the people I’m exchanging messages with don’t deserve my time and energy. That I’m doing something wrong by not outsourcing my communication skills to a token prediction machine.
I’ve looked into it. Some of these features can be turned off. Others can’t. Or if they can, it means also turning off useful long-standing features like automatic thread categorization. I have very little doubt that this is intentional, that the unsolicited summaries and auto replies are a means of artificially inflating the usage metrics for the language model features.
I think we’re all used to user-hostile software these days, but this is the first time I’ve experienced software that feels like it’s actively trying to be disrespectful. Sure, I could switch to a different mail client and never see any of these language model features, but my experience these past months has left such a bad taste that all I’m looking for now is a clean break.
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