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Computer, Respond to This Email

googleresearch.blogspot.com

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Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#61

Post by JoshTriplett »

cromwellian wrote: post #56
ljk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Stop with this "you're the product" nonsense. Please. * what would you call it?

Google does not sell "users", that's why it is inaccurate and misleading. What would you say of a private highway that sells billboards? If the business model of a private highway is not tolls, but instead selling ads along the road. "You're not the user, you're the product?" Would you say the highway owner is selling the personal information of the drivers? The people buying billboards do not receive any personal id…

> What would you say of a private highway that sells billboards? If the business model of a private highway is not tolls, but instead selling ads along the road.

If it's funded primarily by the billboards and not by the drivers, then yes, the billboard purchasers are the real customers. And that could potentially lead to poor results, such as optimizing for billboard viewing time rather than safety and throughput.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#62

Post by jonknee »

bobmichael wrote: post #14
dikaiosune wrote: post #4

While the technology is very cool, this pushes me that much closer to a "dumber" email service. It's always a conflict for me as I love shiny new things, but I'd rather we let AI loose on someone else's email, especially when the AI's revenue stream is advertising (a business predicated on knowing as much as possible about your audience).

I don't think I understand your reasoning. You're already tolerating an AI processing your email to produce the ads, so assuming that, why does a cool new feature push you closer towards a "dumber" service?

More than just the ads (which you may not have if you're on a business account), you're also taking advantage of AI processing for the spam filter.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#63

Post by jerf »

sunnyps wrote: post #57
jerf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lot of words that amount to "Nuh-uh!" The entire point of the "if you're not paying, you're the product" spiel is that everybody already knows everything you said, but there's a fundamental difference between paying and not paying. You're not going to get that far demanding that people stop thinking there's a difference, nor are people going to stop verbalizing that difference, nor should they. What's clich…

That was a rational argument. You know as well as I do that if you explained it the way I did above most people would not care. But instead you insist on the "you're the product" FUD nonsense to elicit an emotional response. Spreading FUD is a demagogue's job, I would never condone it.

The point is that it's a plainly obvious rational argument that is the ground state of the discussion, not some brilliant insight that once it is revealed to people they're sure to see it your way.

And it's not FUD to point out where money flows really come from. In fact I find myself wondering why you are so passionate about people not talking about it? It's not an invalid observation, a lie, or something irrelevant, so people aren't going to stop talking about it. Generally jumping up and down and shouting "Stop following the money!" is, well, not how conversations on HN go, shall we say? If you're searching for something to be contrarian about I can provide a few better candidates....

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#66

Post by IgorPartola »

imh wrote: post #55
IgorPartola wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have a lot more to go off here and the number of replies is limited to maybe a few thousand at most. It can quickly determine if it's a scheduling email, check your calendar, and generate responses like "I am available" and "I'm busy". For others it can be as simple as "I'll check it out and get back to you". Finally, if you are expected to review the automatically composed response or choose from several opt…

I'm talking about a slightly different problem. I'm not suggesting that you might accidentally click to send a reply you didn't want to share, so you reviewing it is beside the point. I'm suggesting that by mining all our emails, it might make a suggestion to me based on something you didn't want to share. E.g. Someone writes me an email about a rare kink you often talk about. You're the main data point on that kink,…

Ah, that makes sense. I think the step where you end up reviewing the reply it composed would prevent most of that.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#67

Post by leephillips »

Zelphyr wrote: post #53
imh wrote: post #29

I appreciate the privacy standards they used (no humans reading your email to develop this), but am concerned that it's not enough. As I understand with language models, overfitting takes the form of returning a sequence of words seen in the training set. If this is overfitting in any part of the response space, this could happen. Out of a million emails, how many suggested responses are going to substantively resemb…

Much of this strikes me as a "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" issue. Google clearly loves machine learning and doing cool things but I think lately they've been taking it too far. For example; after purchasing a book on Amazon recently I happened to do a Google search on that book and the first thing I see is, "Your book is scheduled to be delivered on..." Aside from the creepy factor I'm left wonderin…

I understand why it might seem creepy, at least until you get used to it. But surely you knew that Google's computers were already reading all mail sent to your gmail account. They filter and check for malware and spam based partly on content, and even serve related advertising in the gmail interface (do they still do this?).

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#68

Post by pjmlp »

willhinsa wrote: post #28
pjmlp wrote: post #17

Waiting for the news about social and legal problems that will happen from typing on the wrong answer.

You can anyways undo the sent message! A great feature of Inbox.

No you cannot, it is not part of the email protocol.

Once it is sent, it is gone.

I always have fun with those "Please delete messages" from Outlook sent to my email client.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#69

Post by teraflop »

davidw wrote: post #60
supersan wrote: post #52

I'm often amazed how Google still gives it staff this unique hacker-like approach to their million dollar projects. For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmail) has had some silly things like don't hit send when you're drunk but sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". It's something I wouldn't generally associat…

> sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". That one's not that hard. http://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=95685122323646&w=2

Doing it with a low false positive rate (so that you can enable it for everyone without being annoying) is much harder.

Also, Gmail has lots of users who speak languages other than English... has anyone tested whether the forgotten attachment detector works for them too?

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#70

Post by Spoom »

davidw wrote: post #60
supersan wrote: post #52

I'm often amazed how Google still gives it staff this unique hacker-like approach to their million dollar projects. For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmail) has had some silly things like don't hit send when you're drunk but sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". It's something I wouldn't generally associat…

> sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". That one's not that hard. http://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=95685122323646&w=2

Thunderbird does this as well.
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