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You're not alone: This email from Google's Gemini team is concerning (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Google’s Gemini team is apparently sending out emails about an upcoming change to how Gemini interacts with apps on Android devices. The email informs users that, come July 7, 2025, Gemini will be able to “help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.” Naturally, this has raised some privacy concerns among those who’ve received the email and those using the AI assistant on their Android devices.

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[–] 203 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Dear tech bros,

We, the people, don't want to use your AI shit. Please stop shoving it down our throats. Thank you.

Sincerely,

-The people

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Is it really the people or just a subset of people that use Lemmy, the vast majority of people seemingly don’t care as is evidenced by the sheer number of people using things like social media.

    What might be important to use in this echo chamber isn’t reflective of society on the whole.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago

    It's mainly tech savy people who don't use it. Tons of people in companies use this shit. The number of people who use "ai" to take auto notes in meetings is insane. It's a massive security risk but they do it anyways thinking it won't be stored.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    It's mostly lemmy. In real life people go from amused to indifferent. I have never met anyone as hostile as the lemmy consensus seems to be. If a feature is useful people will use it, be it AI or not AI. Some AI features are gimmicks and they largely get ignored, unless very intrusive (in which case the intrusivity, not the AI, is the problem).

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    If a feature is useful people will use it, be it AI or not AI.

    People will also use it if it's not useful, if it's the default.

    A friend of mine did a search the other day to find the hour of something, and google's AI lied to her. Top of the page, just completely wrong.

    Luckily I said, "That doesn't sound right" and checked the official site, where we found the truth.

    Google is definitely forcing this out, even when it's inferior to other products. Hell, it's inferior to their own, existing product.

    But people will keep using AI, because it's there, and it's right most of the time.

    Google sucks. They should be broken up, and their leadership barred from working in tech. We could have had a better future. Instead we have this hallucinatory hellhole.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    They need a tech ethics board, and people need a license to operate or work in decision-making capacities. Also, anyone above the person's head making an unethical decision loses their license, too. License should be cheap to prevent monopoly, but you have to have one to handle data. Don't have a license. Don't have a company. Plant shitty surveillance without separate, noticeable, succinctly presented agreements that are clear and understandable, with warnings about currently misunderstood uses, then you lose license. First offense.

    Edit: Also mandatory audits with preformulated and separate, and succint notifications are applied. "This company sells your info to the government and police forces. Any private information, even sexual in nature, can be used against you. Your information will be used by several companies to build your complete psychological profile to sell you things you wouldn't normally purchase and predict crimes you might commit."

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    How are you evaluating inferior? I like the AI search. It's my opinion. You have yours.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well, in this example, the information provided by the AI was simply wrong. If it had done the traditional search method of pointing to the organization's website where they had the hours listed, it would have worked fine.

    This idea that "we're all entitled to our opinion" is nonsense. That's for when you're a child and the topic is what flavor Jelly Bean you like. It's not for like policy or things that matter. You can't just "it's my opinion" your way through "this algorithm is O(n^2) but I like it better than O(n) so I'm going to use it for my big website". Or more on topic, you can't use it for "these results are wrong but I like them better"

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Traditional search often is also wrong, showing some 3rd party website or a link farm.

    With AI search I get a summary AND the result list, so I have more info to make a decision.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well, yes, Google has been becoming shittier for years as they prioritize ads and fail to deal with SEO slop. You have to know what's a good source, but that was true even when we were doing research in libraries.

    The AI summary is making the problem worse. The information it provides is not trustworthy. It also deprives site owners from traffic. It's really bad on like every metric.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    The AI summary is additive, I don't see how it makes it worse. I find it useful to save time and it's right in most cases, if I need something of vital importance (like the opening time for a shop) I don't use search results anyway, I go to maps where I expect to find a link to their official website (not trusting the opening hours on maps either).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I don't think it saves time on net if you have to read it and then go verify it anyway. Might as well go directly to the more trustworthy source in the first place! And if you don't care if your answer is correct, why even search? Just make something up.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    It's just more convenient. I'm not usually Googling if a mushroom is poisonous, I'm Googling how to get the length of an array in python or something similar. If it doesn't work, I come back and look at the second result, which happens less than once a week.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I imagine even the fk_ai crowd appreciate the non-gimmick stuff as long as it is nothing like a chatbot

    Tiny example from Gmail:

    This is all over, and it can be super useful from time to time.

    They say “f AI!” but I mean sure they don’t want better searches than were possible five years ago? If it’s not sycophantic and confabulatory etc. etc.

    Good point on intrusivity

    PS

    PS: I translated news from Iran this week using AI tools and using traditional translators. Who would advocate for the garbage traditional translation—soon as I went the “AI” route, it was suddenly possible to understand what the journalists were trying to say. That doesn’t mean I want translators to lose their jobs, it just means I know what the best available technology is and how to use it to get a job done. (And does not mean just because it translates well that I will also trust it to summarize the article for me.)

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    The majority of people eat at McDonalds. It doesn't make it a good idea on your finances or health. Sheep gonna baa.

    If you for some reason think that megacorporations and big tech aren't monetizing the literal majority to the fullest extent of every single law they can break while getting away with it, you need to wake the fuck up. Big time. I don't know if this is some psyop from leddit or what but my doors stay closed, my android plays tablet mode with no sim. Thanks tho.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I've been trying to tell people for 15 years. It hasn't worked a single bit. It's frustrating that people think they have nothing to hide when their carelessness and lack of tech knowledge is ruining the future of the next generations. I just can't try to explain it to everyone. They don't link the relation at all. I thought maybe eventually, they would just get it, but here we still are...

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago*

    yes but what if a company has the ability to create billions of close friends who can recommend sponsored products to you? why would it care about whether you want that or not?

    also bard was a way better name for google's LLM. it has its origins in an isaac asimov story about a robot who is programmed to tell random stories.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    The problem is there’s a fair amount of tech CEOs that insist this is the future and everyone needs to hop on which between the hype train, the amount of software peeps out of a job because of layoffs and the amount of snake oils salesmen out of a job because this eats google’s lunch this bubble is just ballooning. You have a lot of people hitching on this bandwagon hoping to sell shovels to the next gold rush.

    And for awhile everything is just gonna get shittier.

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  • [+] -18 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You don't want to use it.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The companies keep preloading it on new tech, updating old tech so its there, preventing the option from disabling it from even being there, and disabling tech that can't use it.

    This. Shit. Can. Fuck. All. The. Way. Off!

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