Gmail AI gets more intrusive
daveverse.org
daveverse.org
Recently anyways. The most egregious thing about Youtube, which is not terribly new, is the Shorts. If your video is short enough, it is auto-converted to a "Short", and the original aspect ratio gets cropped to be vertical orientation (for viewing on a phone, presumably).
Of course Google doesn't have to care about users because they have a dozen different monopolies. It's sad that they were allowed to get to this point.
However with that also being said Google is a menace
Unless it’s Google’s price, and network effects you want.
In which case…well, they’ve already told you.
I have ADHD. YouTube shorts are poison. I don’t want them. I keep clicking “not interested”. They go away for a bit, they come back, I waste hours of my life scrolling through them before I notice. I click “not interested” 20 more times to get a few days relief…
Even when you’re the customer, you’re not the customer.
I think a better way to phrase "if you're not the customer, you're the product" is "we don't want your money, we want you".
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/shortsblocker-and-r...
And apropos of nothing... there's another link on the front page at the moment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850430 ) talking about Apple crossing the red line of customer satisfaction. This got me thinking... to Alphabet, you're not the customer, you're the product. YouTube is a sugary trap to lure eyeballs into the advosphere.
Only "sort of" though since they still use the same spammy algorithm-driven timeline and Shorts and stuff, and are clearly still trying to maximize your total watch time. Given that I just pay a fixed fee, I wish they'd use a different algorithm that only seeks to keep my engagement with YouTube from dipping too low, rather than the default which is clearly designed to turn a 23-hour-a-day user into 24.
The absolutely wild disparity in compute required to translate the Japanese text to English vs rendering an entirely new soundtrack in English blows my mind. I guess someone at Google thought it made sense because many people prefer dubs to subs, but that's on highly polished entertainment product vs 1-person-and-their-Japanese-vlog channels which are not aiming at a mass audience.
I agree that the auto dubbing is the worst feature. It may have been HN where I read the above tip to turn that off, it seems to have worked for me so far.
YouTube is also applying "AI enhancement" to videos. Several people have had their videos replaced with a mangled version that flashes bright rapid flickering static through the background. It's a genuine epilepsy danger and the channel owner has no control. If they complain to YouTube the video sometimes is silently replaced with the original (until the bots get to it again). Otherwise they can only repeatedly re-upload the video.
It's insane how desperate all of tech is to quintuple down on the sunk cost of AI
I remember back when i had a site with Google ads on it (about 15 or 20 years ago) I could not change some selection to do with what ads were shown on my .co.uk site to UK because I was not in the UK at the time.
There were other issues with default language assumptions, which were worse as they changed over time. They really should respect browser settings.
Its not just Google. A lot of websites use national flags for languages, which has practical problems in countries that speak many languages, and frequently has political overtones.
More people speak multiple languages than just one
Anyway, my point is that people who speak multiple languages do not fit Google's world view.
At Google, you're not the customer, and you're not even the product; you're a metric in a promo packet. Your value in the "AI engagement" column vastly exceeds your value as a satisfied user. The system is working as intended.
Google’s Help: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322
Also relevant:
> By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom
Gear -> All Settings -> General tab (default) -> Smart features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet
Linked help page: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322
For how long?
You don't own the platform. Google PMs may decide to roll it out to everyone at some point to hit numbers.
What would you suggest people do. Self-host?
I'm just trying to understand why you posted this. It's generically true. Any company can change anything at any point. May as well just pack it up boys.
Yes, any SaaS can change any feature at any time. Some companies have different motives though. We're not paying for GMail. When customers pay a monthly subscription and can cancel at any time, you usually want to keep them happy.
The internal motives are also different. Are employees promoted for just launching stuff? Are they running out of helpful features to launch?
You've got to use either Gmail, Microsoft, Protonmail, etc. I don't love them, but Proton is probably the best of a bad bunch.
this is not true unless you end up on an IP previously abused
if you don't want to take on the risk at all, there's email services for pennies / thousand emails
I'm seriously interested. Which ones would you recommend? Are they reliable?
These have all been running for many years and work fine, hell there's even the meme addresses at cock.li which has been running for over 10 years.
You don't need to be on a gmail account for reliable email.
In principle, but look at all the ways Gmail bends over backwards to keep ancient UI preferences working. You can configure it for different inbox presentations, different densities, snippets or not, images displayed or not, UI icons or text, you can disable and enable threading, you can put chat and meet on one side or not, you can have keyboard shortcuts or not, you can remap all the keyboard shortcuts if you use them, etc etc etc.
I suppose, to your point, Google doesn't have to make it optional in other countries... But that discrepancy would seem to have a lot of downside (maintenance, optics, docs) for little upside (...force adoption against the will of users who would go out of their way to opt out of they could?).
Keyboard shortcuts probably would work like I'd expect, people like me would go "Hell no, no keyboard shortcuts in browser application EVER", and power users would opt into that in an instant.
Are Google's incentives misaligned in some way here? It's not like the heuristics are particularly difficult for this kind of email. Some of it even has unsubscribe links (I didn't subscribe), or, "If you don't want to hear from me again, just let me know", etc.
I don't know if this counts as "drip marketing" (a new term to me), but just this week Apple spammed me with some Apple Card offer for Hertz car rentals.
No way to unsubscribe. No link. No mention of unsubscribing at all. And on the Apple Card web site, no way to turn off marketing emails.
I wish you could still report these spam's to the FTC.
Bold of you to think they know what is this.
I have seen enough people who wholeheartedly though the things in their phone stays in it and you lose access to them if you move to another phone.
The above poster is not talking to end users about the web interface. The poster is talking to you. About the fact that end users don't separate the interface from the thing.
You are making the same argument with the same language to someone that made the same point.
There's no evidence, no blurred-out screen shot even, no one here has seen this behavior in the comments, and I can't find any corroborating reports on the web.
Who knows what's really happening or not here?
https://www.metalunderground.com/news/details.cfm?newsid=575...
Life continues, move on, defending Google enshitfication online after being laid off is extra work for no payment, you can rest.
With search in gcloud, the drop-down top 2/3 is ai calls to action. Completely useless because their suggestions are so bad and for such basic tasks that I never do.
It feels like in platform advertising.
I've left them feedback, and since they've only doubled down, am now reducing my spend
Moving to Cloudflare, if you're curious
https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/email...
"dave is mad at gmail". okay dave.
You have just summarized HN, and most of social media and the blogosphere, in 2025.
The internet is 44% angry people getting off on being angry about nothing.
the comments are often full of silly gripes, but they don't usually get voted up to the top of the homepage and stay there for hours
However nearly nobody seems to correctly implement this user-wide memory.
I paid for and tried Google AI for Gmail and was appalled at how bad it is. The product team there is really not executing well. I've switched now to Shortwave. It works very well and having LLM+RAG queries for 20+ years of email archives has been very helpful to me.
1. The incessant "Using Gmail to run your business?" upsells. No, I'm unemployed and this is a personal account. Unlike the AI upsell, I can't seem to dismiss this permanently. It just snoozes it until the next time I open it.
2. The Search bar has become dangerously glitchy (at least in Firefox for Mac) if you type fast and have keyboard shortcuts on. It lets me type 1 or 2 characters before it starts treating every character as a shortcut, inadvertently deleting, muting, archiving emails. Search is what sets Gmail apart and now it is unusable. I reported this bug to Google months ago and my patience is running thin.
I'll be typing something in the search box and suddenly I'll end up navigating somewhere with the keyboard focus having gotten removed from there.
I'm convinced that nobody in Google speaks more than one language, otherwise they would have never done that. It is impossible to turn off the unsolicited translations in search, and now youtube. I'm scared that soon they will force up audio translation as well.
Can’t screenshot without revealing the name but I think it’s actually super cool of Google to do this. Just distributed charity. With no benefit to themselves.
They did say that they did it based on my Google Photos showing that I was really good looking (can’t share because of privacy) so there’s some privacy stuff there but overall I think it’s good.
I see obviously AI-powered tab-completion suggestions, and the Alt-H prompt suggestion when first writing an email, but I've never had it actually insert text unprompted.
For me it sometimes (I'm not sure why, it isn't even "intelligent" about which emails have options, automatic noreply@ emails sometimes have it) has buttons to pre-fill a reply with a message out of a few choices. It's not unprompted, but I could see someone accidentally clicking it instead of the reply button.
Yes, I realize that dropping the GMail mailbox does not mean you are free from GMail, because of all of the other people on it. But we must each make some effort to chip away at that thing. Twenty years ago, when Microsoft's hold on PCs was much stronger than it is today, online venues were inundated with derision and denouncement of them and their practices; but these days - it's as though Alphabet/Google control of all these aspects of so many people's lives is just neutral reality, ho-hum, nothing to waste time thinking about.
Man I was so triggered though, like old-man-yelling-at-clouds level. Then I went back through gmail and exactly one of the last 50 most recent emails I've received was not an alert or a newsletter or an invite. IOW out of my last 50 emails only one of them would've fit the bill for an AI-written correspondence taking the place of a human-written one. All that butt-hurt and it doesn't even matter.
So long way of getting around to saying that your point about intentionality and clarity is clutch, and if people can get that with AI-written emails maybe I can cool my jets.
in a number of algorithmic ways,
when a message row is selected.
> Gmail doesn't just offer to write your emails for you, they actually do it, and it's up to you to delete the text it wrote.
> Hard to make a screen shot to demo without revealing personal info. That's how awful this thing is.
> It reeks of desperation.
This is the whole article. That's it. No screenshot. No details. Nothing. Just three random sentences.
200+ upvote on HN btw.
In truth it felt both amazing and made me uneasy, for AI was encroaching on my career of telling people to reboot their errant device.
spreadsheet truly is a universal interface for number crunching, and not being able to use AI inside sheets is a bummer.
Be dumb pipes
Google has already arguably ruined Youtube, which they own, over a period of many, many years
It doesn't matter if the community does all the work, the company will MITM themselves to make themselves look more important than they are
A lot of new Google features are branded 'AI', because it's so hyped it has broad consumer awareness, but a lot of Google features for a long time have used AI and just been brandless or at least 'AI'-less features.
Recently it started adding them to my calendar and there is no way to turn off this feature without also turning off useful features such as package out for delivery notifications.
OTOH, it's nice to see that there is some innovation happening - eventually (I am an optimist) they will weed out the lousy stuff and keep the useful.
What's the other factor though and is it worth the getting walled in?
Password manager in my opinion has to be its own thing, has nothing to do with the rest, same for VPN. I can see email, calendar and data being close together as being beneficial in every day flow. That's where Fastmail for instance draws the line I think.
If you untangle these, would the cost not be worth the benefit?
> Is this e-mail marketing something?
Otherwise, you could always just switch the "promotions" tab off - the contents will show up in your main inbox, but without the ads.
If it's a seemingly personal message from an unknown sender, send it to spam. If it looks like a mass email (that someone might have signed up for), then put it in the Commercial tab or whatever it's called, so I can set up a filter for it or unsubscribe.
Do we have to riot in the streets before governments regulate this shit?
That doesn't require an answer—both sides of the fence already well know the reasons and they're diametrically opposite.
I didn't move anywhere, what gave you the impression I did?