This morning I received a text message on my Pixel device from Google’s AI product saying, “Hi I’m Gemini and I can chat with you about questions…” the message had two rows of suggested words/statements and a huge Continue button.
I immediately marked it as spam. We’ll see whether that worked. But according to the good people at Google, “You can now get help writing a tough message, planning a party, or just having a fun conversation.”
A fun conversation? Oh fuck off.
What I don’t need is the infantilizing of my communication and connections. I’m already annoyed that Teams (our company’s preferred video/chat software) wants to add animated reactions like balloons, confetti, or thumbs up emoji over video. Despite turning off that “feature,” it still happens and I am now purely waiting to screengrab the indignity of one of those showing up whilst having a decidedly not fun conversation.
Business meetings in an MMO environment or virtual world? Look, if Jeff in Legal rocks up to an all staff as a hilarious giraffe, I’m out. I’m done.
On LinkedIn, under almost every post there’s now a little banner where their machine offers to summarize the content or explain more about something referenced in it.
First of all, a growing portion of posts on LinkedIn are the result of people getting sucked into answering questions — a little ego-dose thanks to being told they’re an authority on whatever provocative hairball the system coughs up in their feed. Treating your users as a content farm so you can jack up your engagement metrics to presumably get more ad revenue and high five in the hallways about the growth rate is… well, it’s certainly a choice.
I wonder how long it will be before our machines will simply be embroiled in conversations with another; Alexa repeatedly telling the phone’s virtual assistant “I didn’t quite get that,” pumping oodles noise online, while actual human users walk slowly away from the machines, turning those ad impressions into even more questionable garbage than they already are.
This inane LLM integration across platforms is as clumsy as AOL Keywords and Clippy were. I don’t need a chatbot explainer of every goddamn post I see. I don’t need my texts rewritten to sound, oh I don’t know, funner.
Much like the way raw materials, unfinished wood, and “touching grass,” trended against a rise in impossibly smooth, flatscreens and digital surfaces, I’m going to assume there will be a natural backlash to this hype cycle, where we’ll come to love typos, unanswered questions, and things that require us to think deeper.
But right now as we suffer through the stupid phase, where product managers have clearly lost all connection to UX people, and the actual end user — or human — I don’t mean to be all get off my lawn about it, but I implore the tech companies to include the perspective of a grown-up before rolling out these features.
This title inspired by How I Became Stupid, by Martin Page, a book I read and loved a few years before LinkedIn or Gmail existed.
