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Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

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Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#71

Post by toomuchtodo »

aerovistae wrote: post #9

Good lord that's scary. Rapidly ushering in the future where none of our words are our own. Anyone ever read Roald Dahl's short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator ? 10/10 strongly recommend, about an engineer who develops a computer-like machine able to compose fiction. Googling "the great automatic grammatizator pdf" gives a .doc version as the top result, for me anyway.

"David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization program, that if successful, will make his career. [SPOILER: ELOPe is essentially Smart Compose in Gmail] But when the project is suddenly in danger of being canceled, David embeds a hidden directive in the software accidentally creating a runaway artificial intelligence.

David and his team are initially thrilled when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers. But excitement turns to fear as the team realizes that they are being manipulated by an A.I. who is redirecting corporate funds, reassigning personnel and arming itself in pursuit of its own agenda."

"Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears" (3 part book series)

https://smile.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Ap... (Book one)

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#72

Post by peatmoss »

dmazin wrote: post #43
scrollaway wrote: post #21

So why exactly are people suddenly up in arms about this? How's it different from opening up your android phone and using google's spellcheck, with algorithms that predict your next word when you're typing? Never seen such atrociously negative comments to what's essentially a cool feature you can disable. PS: How many of the outraged people here are actually voting with their wallet and paying for something like Fast…

Two big problems. One, AI mediation of language sees issues like bias amplification (AI learns our biases then suggests them back to us). Google itself wrote about this recently [1]. Two, spell check has a homogenizing effect on spelling [2]. If you extend this to the level of phrases, that will homogenize not just spelling but the very way we talk. [1] https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-mod...…

To add a third, I have a problem with my personal emails being used as a corpus of text to train these models.

Maybe they're using only my emails to train a model for me, and turning that feature off disables them doing so. Maybe they're using everyone's email to train a generic model.

Of course, they've been (machine) reading your emails to provide ads since forever, so in that sense maybe this isn't really that new. That said, many people habituated to email reading for ads back when Google's brand image was riding higher.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#73

Post by scrollaway »

Invictus0 wrote: post #59
scrollaway wrote: post #21

So why exactly are people suddenly up in arms about this? How's it different from opening up your android phone and using google's spellcheck, with algorithms that predict your next word when you're typing? Never seen such atrociously negative comments to what's essentially a cool feature you can disable. PS: How many of the outraged people here are actually voting with their wallet and paying for something like Fast…

How many times does it take for people to understand that incremental "cool" features are exactly what leads to a dystopian future? Facebook added one cool feature after another until suddenly people realized that Facebook knew everything about you; only then were people alarmed. This is so obviously, blatantly terrible it's beyond belief that anyone could be in support of this. It's literally bending the way you thi…

Are you seriously not seeing the difference between [human] giving information to [company], versus [company] making a suggestion to [human]?

I never liked Facebook; I never thought any of Facebook's cool features made up for their creepy business model. I do like Google and Google Mail because I pay for the service and the relationship is extremely different. But that's outside the point anyway. You're giving information to the company by simply using gmail (receiving and sending emails through gmail). Autocomplete is a feature that doesn't gather information (at best a yes/no)...

Seriously, wtf is dystopian about autocomplete? Do you write your code in nano or something?

And how much thought do you put into an email anyway? Outside of development ones, all my emails are extremely standard (the few times I even bother sending any). I won't use this for development emails. What is the problem?

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#74

Post by dmazin »

peatmoss wrote: post #72
dmazin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two big problems. One, AI mediation of language sees issues like bias amplification (AI learns our biases then suggests them back to us). Google itself wrote about this recently [1]. Two, spell check has a homogenizing effect on spelling [2]. If you extend this to the level of phrases, that will homogenize not just spelling but the very way we talk. [1] https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-mod...…

To add a third, I have a problem with my personal emails being used as a corpus of text to train these models. Maybe they're using only my emails to train a model for me, and turning that feature off disables them doing so. Maybe they're using everyone's email to train a generic model. Of course, they've been (machine) reading your emails to provide ads since forever, so in that sense maybe this isn't really that new…

Yup, I forgot where I read this, but I believe all Gmails are eligible for the model. Again, forgot where I saw this, but Google takes great precaution to protect your data from human inspection, but being used in the corpus is fair game.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#75

Post by peatmoss »

dmazin wrote: post #74
peatmoss wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add a third, I have a problem with my personal emails being used as a corpus of text to train these models. Maybe they're using only my emails to train a model for me, and turning that feature off disables them doing so. Maybe they're using everyone's email to train a generic model. Of course, they've been (machine) reading your emails to provide ads since forever, so in that sense maybe this isn't really that new…

Yup, I forgot where I read this, but I believe all Gmails are eligible for the model. Again, forgot where I saw this, but Google takes great precaution to protect your data from human inspection, but being used in the corpus is fair game.

I think if you are a (paid?) enterprise user, they do not do this.

On the other hand, sussing out what is and is not fair game is quite a lot easier with a service such as Fastmail.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#76

Post by joelrunyon »

Side note:

How is this blog design by Google considered "good"? Between the dropdown from the top when you scroll and the stickied footer, about a 1/3 of the page is easily readable (shoved into about 500px).

I'm not a designer. But this stuff is bad. How is this greenlit at Google?

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#77

Post by njarboe »

I could write emails faster if, when composing an email, the "New Message" box did not cover up the email that I am reading and wanting to respond to. There used to be a function to tear off the "New Message" box, but I guess that was too confusing for people? Now I have to open another browser window if I want to look at an email and compose one at the same time.

I'd love to know if there is a good work around or trick to have the compose window open up in a separate window.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#78

Post by aurailious »

dmazin wrote: post #33

This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]). I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: ( http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s... ) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references

I've heard arguments going both ways. That the internet and connectivity is going to dramatically slow language drift as well as accelerate it. I think the real answer is that we are rapidly changing how we talk but to a homogenous standard.

I really wonder how global language will change over the next century. I would really like to know if English continues to borrow from other languages or all these dictionaries are going to stop that.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#79

Post by scrollaway »

peatmoss wrote: post #75
dmazin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I forgot where I read this, but I believe all Gmails are eligible for the model. Again, forgot where I saw this, but Google takes great precaution to protect your data from human inspection, but being used in the corpus is fair game.

I think if you are a (paid?) enterprise user, they do not do this. On the other hand, sussing out what is and is not fair game is quite a lot easier with a service such as Fastmail.

Doesn't have to be "enterprise". Anyone can pay $5/mo for GSuite (https://gsuite.google.com), which includes gmail and a ton of other tools. Furthermore, it's on your own domain rather than @gmail.com, which is not only better (you truly own the email address), it's also a hell of a lot more professional and makes it easier to migrate to other services if you wish to.

To put it bluntly, if anyone here is complaining and has an @gmail.com address, email me and I'll be happy to help you buy your own domain and create MX records to either gsuite or fastmail. But I just can't hear the empty negativity anymore from consumers who say "no! bad google!", yet, by using the free product, keep making their emails available for the AI models and keep signaling to Google that an advertising business model works better than a paid-per-user one.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#80

Post by black_puppydog »

kazinator wrote: post #68
dmazin wrote: post #33

This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]). I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: ( http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s... ) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references

If you write a word your spellchecker doesn't like, and you accede to the spellchecker, then it's not actually a word. Not to you. An utterance is only a word if you believe it in it and are confident enough to defend it against the opinion of a dumb machine. So this alleged culling of the lexicon by the spellchecker is largely a shakeout of non-words. Firefox's edit widget is underlining "spellchecker" in red, but I…

wait, so according to that, old words that are still written in old manuscripts/stones down which but we don't remember the meaning of, simply because they weren't used for too long, would not be words? I tend to disagree...
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