Hardwired
In Hardwired, AC Senior Editor Harish Jonnalagadda delves into all things hardware, including phones, audio products, storage servers, and networking gear.
Google once again took to I/O to extol AI and talk about how agentic AI is going to free us from mundane tasks to such an extent that we’ll all have so much free time we won’t know what to do with. There’s just one problem with that — AI in its current iteration isn’t anywhere close to being as good.
I like using Google’s services; I set up my Gmail account close to two decades ago, I have 11 years’ worth of photos and videos stored in Photos, and important documents in Drive — a good chunk of my digital presence is inexorably linked to my Google account.
I was okay with the tradeoffs it involved; I didn’t mind sharing my data with Google back when all it did with that information was serve me targeted ads. That isn’t the case with AI. With Google using personal data to train AI models — ostensibly to provide customized information — I’m wary of how much of my data is being siphoned into Gemini. Thankfully, it’s easy enough (for now) to prevent Gemini from accessing Drive, Photos, Gmail, and other services. I did so by disabling Gemini’s logs; go to your Google’s account settings, and toggle Gemini Apps Activity to off.
While it’s easy enough to ignore Gemini right now, Google is intent on putting that damn sparkle icon just about everywhere. I’m greeted by an Ask Gemini button in Chrome, it’s ever-present in Gmail (I don’t want to summarize a 100-word email!), and for reasons I don’t understand, it’s bundled into Google Photos (which had a metadata-based search that was just fine), and even Maps is getting Gemini now.
Google also showcased how Docs Live acts as a “thought partner and co-writer” when you’re “rambling a stream of consciousness or brainstorming an idea.” Umm, no thanks. I get that AI is the ultimate buzzword now, and Google is ideally positioned to leverage it — the search giant already has troves of data from billions of users, so it makes sense to put that to use to train its models. But I don’t want any part of it, and while I get that these features are useful if you need assistance in drafting a document or writing a formal email, I don’t see any utility in any of the myriad of new Gemini features coming to Docs, Gmail, or even Keep. I don’t want to talk to Keep to organize my thoughts — that’s where I go to jot down never-ending to-do lists.
All I wanted was for Google to make any meaningful changes to Search, but what we got instead was a wholesale AI makeover that doesn’t address the lingering issues facing Google’s marquee product. The quality of search has degraded to such an extent that it’s an SEO-riddled spam — particularly in India. Google knows this, and that’s why it started serving Reddit and Quora results prominently on the page, ostensibly to deal with spam.
As brands increasingly push these AI services and make them harder to ignore, I’m reminded of a post that talks about teaching in the age of generative AI. It goes into how LLMs have made coursework frictionless to a point where the “process of doing the work” is negated. That made me think a lot about how a little amount of friction is needed, even with mundane tasks. Whether that’s cleaning up digital data (a Sunday morning task I’ve been doing for the better part of a decade), sorting out all the bills, managing subscriptions, organizing photos and videos, there’s a sense of reward that I get when doing these tasks, and I don’t want AI to remove that friction.
Look, I’ll admit that Google did a decent job outlining its AI vision; Gemini Spark, Omni, Daily Brief, and Universal Cart all tie into what the brand has been doing over the last year, and it’s a natural extension to the chatbot. I get that these features have tangible utility, but I don’t see a need to use any of them, and I don’t see that changing soon.
