Outside the world of open-source computing, it’s getting pretty hard to escape artificial intelligence being jammed down our throats for even the most banal tasks. Google’s Gmail was already awful — it watches what you type, what you buy, and who you correspond with, all in the name of monetization. Somehow, they’ve found a way to make it even worse: you’re no longer expected to read the messages that folks send you. AI will do that light lift for you, helping your brain move one step closer to pottage. In a blog post, Gmail’s vice president of product declared:
“…email has changed considerably since Gmail launched in 2004. With email volume at an all-time high, managing your inbox and the flow of information has become as important as the emails themselves. To help, we’re bringing Gmail into the Gemini era and making it your personal, proactive inbox assistant.”
I call nonsense.
The key reason that email has changed so much in the past two decades is that people keep messing with it. It’s no longer enough to keep in touch or have a Nigerian prince offer us millions in exchange for our services. Our names, gender, and age get sucked out of what we write. Link any social media, dating site, or shopping account to your email address, and your provider knows about it — and shares it for profit. Injecting AI into the mix is just one more way to monetize our information.
If it hasn’t hit already, Gmail users will see a new Terms of Service disclaimer and be forced to agree before they can continue using their account. Once permission’s been given, the pillaging begins in earnest. Google’s party line is that AI will make email more productive by summarizing messages and helping us write shorter replies. Want to kill your ability to read and write anything more than a bullet point? This is how you get there. If you give an LLM even more access to your information, teaching it to better ape human speech while putting more people out of work, allowing this kind of thing will certainly help that along.
Any suggestions for alternative email systems?
When something is free to users, that's because the users are being sold to someone else, or performing some kind of uncompensated work by using the system.