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Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

moddedbear.com

191–200 of 865 posts

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#191
post #151

I can appreciate LLMs for some use cases, but writing emails for the user is the one that really baffles me. It's one thing if you don't speak English well and could use some help making yourself understood, but the amount of native speakers using this is so strange to me. How does this help you? If you can write to the LLM telling it what kind of email to write, you might as well just write the email.

I don't use gmail but often get an LLM to write certain emails. The benefit is that it can pull in context and typically one-shot the email without me prompting it at all.

For example, a tenant emails me about some issue relating to a specific property. It can go through my leases, find the right one, check other emails to see I ordered a new appliance to that specific address, track shipping/install, all that, then reply appropriately.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#192
One of the most frustrating parts about Google's approach to AI in general is their project manager-y directive from on-high, that any Google product needs to adopt all Google's AI tools, wherever possible, and will be ranked on how deeply the integration goes.

In the margins: the user.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#193
The LLM is also training on or reading your emails; my wife was emailing a client and it produced absolute garbage and in that garbage was information the clanker shouldn’t have known unless it read the other emails. That’s probably not a surprise but the implications are staggering.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#194

I don't get it. Just don't use the Gmail interface. Use your own mail reader. Don't conflate "Gmail the UI" with "Gmail the mail provider". Having said this - I never used Gmail for anything serious - I had my own domain + mail etc since before Gmail existed, and the reason was I got tired of "free" tools making my life miserable.

> 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.

It took that long for the experience to degrade?!

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#195

The most annoying thing I noticed about Google trying to shoehorn “AI magic” into their products is Google Maps. I try to help someone navigate with a child in the backseat and they shoveled an AI button into their UI that is even active when you are navigating… Annoyed me so much. I already picked the supermarket I want to go to, now just get out of my way and get me there.

That won’t help a PM hit their bonus

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#196

Making a 10 min email/work doc used to take far longer than 10 mins. Now it takes far less. This breaks the built-in guard against wasting people’s time. I wonder if a minor UI change might help a bit: make it normal to show “approx 15 min read” in the email/whatever interface. Just some sort of “this is the baseline amount of work you’re asking of the recipient.”

I actually loathe those "approx whatever time to read" notices for about the same reasons the OP lists.

You or your model do not have and can not a clue how fast or slow I read, or, and that is the point, how much time I intend to spend on whatever is up.

The mirror is that you cannot know who my recipent is, or what I'm trying to communicate. It is equivalent in this sense.

You only [propose to] clutter the already overcluttered interface with crap, slop and shit. So bugger off pretty please. If you do not, there goes your product: outta my window.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#198
Overly aggrieved style of writing. There's some prompts in Gmail to use AI. These are supposedly indictments of the author's writing or intellect? Anyway, the setting is in General and then Cmd-F "smart" and turn everything off.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#199

You know what's even worse? That if he had tried any of those "here look! we can write it for you!" tools he’d have found out that they don't even work . Gmail summaries are nonsensical most of the times. The suggested replies completely miss the intent of the original message I was trying to write. Most AI integrations around are basically alpha-quality code, that if there wasn't this forced pressure to adopt AI, AI…

Oh I got an email about a booked flight, Europe, Denver, Vegas. For some reason the times weren’t picked up in my calendar so I naively thought I’ll try their AI tools to put it there…

I tried to get it to work for five minutes, it couldn’t get it to work.

Then I was so pissed that tried for another thirty minutes to “prompt” my way to get the events created correctly, highlighted the timezone issues…

Then gave up and did it manually in 2 minutes.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#200

The most annoying thing I noticed about Google trying to shoehorn “AI magic” into their products is Google Maps. I try to help someone navigate with a child in the backseat and they shoveled an AI button into their UI that is even active when you are navigating… Annoyed me so much. I already picked the supermarket I want to go to, now just get out of my way and get me there.

The button renders itself after the user interface is complete.

It bumps over all the other buttons to the right.

The home or work button gets replaced with the AI button.

This is infuriating for muscle memory.

Whoever did this will need to beg my forgiveness if we ever meet.

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