[HN Gopher] Gmail AI gets more intrusive
___________________________________________________________________
Gmail AI gets more intrusive
Author : speckx
Score : 214 points
Date : 2025-11-07 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (daveverse.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (daveverse.org)
| verdverm wrote:
| 100% Google has been making their AI more intrusive and in your
| face across all their portfolio. It's not just Google, Atlassian
| is doing the same
|
| With search in gcloud, the drop-down top 2/3 is ai calls to
| action. Completely useless because their suggestions are so bad
| and for such basic tasks that I never do.
|
| It feels like in platform advertising.
|
| I've left them feedback, and since they've only doubled down, am
| now reducing my spend
|
| Moving to Cloudflare, if you're curious
| dangoor wrote:
| Cloudflare has a gmail competitor?
| NewJazz wrote:
| Not really 1:1 but I did find this
|
| https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-
| platform/products/email...
| bamboozled wrote:
| I hate the "AI mode"
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Did the user accidentally keep hitting Alt+H? Or are they part of
| some experiment? Gmail writes nothing for me unless I click the
| "help me write" link. I also don't know why it is so hard to
| record a screenshot of the behavior, you can write it to
| example@example.com, and the draft email UI can be clipped from
| where it shows your email address.
| spankalee wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know what he's talking about.
|
| I see obviously AI-powered tab-completion suggestions, and the
| Alt-H prompt suggestion when first writing an email, but I've
| never had it actually insert text unprompted.
| gs17 wrote:
| > Gmail writes nothing for me unless I click the "help me
| write" link.
|
| For me it sometimes (I'm not sure why, it isn't even
| "intelligent" about which emails have options, automatic
| noreply@ emails sometimes have it) has buttons to pre-fill a
| reply with a message out of a few choices. It's not unprompted,
| but I could see someone accidentally clicking it instead of the
| reply button.
| merelysounds wrote:
| Anecdotally, I don't see any of this. I have all "smart" features
| in gmail turned off; there is an option like this in the
| settings.
|
| Google's Help: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322
|
| Also relevant:
|
| > By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The
| European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom
| protoster wrote:
| This is often the case with Google products because the A/B
| testing is rampant.
| kyrra wrote:
| This. You can disable all smart features (which includes things
| like mail categories, AI auto-complete, and most things that
| look at your emails).
|
| Gear -> All Settings -> General tab (default) -> Smart
| features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet
|
| Linked help page:
| https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322
| pera wrote:
| I really wished they would also let you disable those very
| annoying modal popups announcing yet-another-chatbot-
| integration twice a week: My company is already paying for
| your product, just let me do my work ffs...
| echelon wrote:
| > You can disable all smart features
|
| For how long?
|
| You don't own the platform. Google PMs may decide to roll it
| out to everyone at some point to hit numbers.
| ctoth wrote:
| And this is generically true and always has been about
| every aspect of GMail?
|
| What would you suggest people do. Self-host?
|
| I'm just trying to understand why you posted this. It's
| generically true. Any company can change anything at any
| point. May as well just pack it up boys.
| hdjrudni wrote:
| > I'm just trying to understand why you posted this. It's
| generically true. Any company can change anything at any
| point. May as well just pack it up boys.
|
| Yes, any SaaS can change any feature at any time. Some
| companies have different motives though. We're not paying
| for GMail. When customers pay a monthly subscription and
| can cancel at any time, you usually want to keep them
| happy.
|
| The internal motives are also different. Are employees
| promoted for just launching stuff? Are they running out
| of helpful features to launch?
| skywhopper wrote:
| The point is to say that it's bad and Google specifically
| can't be trusted. It's good to express disapproval of
| unethical business practices.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| You can't self-host these days -- your emails will get
| stuck in every kind of spam filter there is, and you'll
| always have cause to wonder if your emails are received
| by their intended recipients, or lost to the abyss.
|
| You've got to use either Gmail, Microsoft, Protonmail,
| etc. I don't love them, but Proton is probably the best
| of a bad bunch.
| blibble wrote:
| > You can't self-host these days -- your emails will get
| stuck in every kind of spam filter there is, and you'll
| always have cause to wonder if your emails are received
| by their intended recipients, or lost to the abyss.
|
| this is not true unless you end up on an IP previously
| abused
|
| if you don't want to take on the risk at all, there's
| email services for pennies / thousand emails
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| > if you don't want to take on the risk at all, there's
| email services for pennies / thousand emails
|
| I'm seriously interested. Which ones would you recommend?
| Are they reliable?
| worble wrote:
| Migadu, Fastmail, Protonmail, Zoho, Tutanota
|
| These have all been running for many years and work fine,
| hell there's even the meme addresses at cock.li which has
| been running for over 10 years.
|
| You don't need to be on a gmail account for reliable
| email.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > And this is generically true and always has been about
| every aspect of GMail?
|
| In principle, but look at all the ways Gmail bends over
| backwards to keep ancient UI preferences working. You can
| configure it for different inbox presentations, different
| densities, snippets or not, images displayed or not, UI
| icons or text, you can disable and enable threading, you
| can put chat and meet on one side or not, you can have
| keyboard shortcuts or not, you can remap all the keyboard
| shortcuts if you use them, etc etc etc.
| OJFord wrote:
| Well, they're off by default in the countries mentioned in
| the top-level comment because they're legally required to
| be opt-in there (the implementation rather than the feature
| of course, but it couldn't really be otherwise).
|
| I suppose, to your point, Google doesn't _have_ to make it
| optional in other countries... But that discrepancy would
| seem to have a lot of downside (maintenance, optics, docs)
| for little upside (...force adoption against the will of
| users who would go out of their way to opt out of they
| could?).
| mrweasel wrote:
| How many would turn them on if they defaulted to "Off"?
| Probably not enough to justify the development cost.
| kvirani wrote:
| True but that is a function of ignorance too. There are
| plenty of good features in Gmail that are off by default,
| like undo / delayed send and keyboard shortcuts.
| mrweasel wrote:
| "Enable delay send - Allows you to undo sending emails
| for 5 minutes", I'd argue that a lot of people would
| enable that pretty fast.
|
| Keyboard shortcuts probably would work like I'd expect,
| people like me would go "Hell no, no keyboard shortcuts
| in browser application EVER", and power users would opt
| into that in an instant.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Allow you to undo sending for 5 minutes means email
| delivery is delayed by 5 minutes.
| kelnos wrote:
| It doesn't have to be 5 minutes. It could be 15 seconds.
| I've used that feature (in Fastmail), and find it very
| valuable.
| golem14 wrote:
| I'm confused. Doesn't gmail offer an 'undo' for send by
| default ? At least for the last 5 years ? It's in General
| settings "Undo Send" and can be set up to 30 seconds ?
| adriand wrote:
| I would really love it if there was a "smart setting" (or a
| dumb setting) to prevent people from sending me their drip
| marketing spam. The spam filtering in my personal Gmail is
| adequate, if not perfect (I really don't understand how the
| constant life insurance spam is getting through). But my main
| client uses Google Workspace or GSuite or whatever it is called
| these days, and my inbox for that email features a constant
| barrage of drip campaign garbage.
|
| Are Google's incentives misaligned in some way here? It's not
| like the heuristics are particularly difficult for this kind of
| email. Some of it even has unsubscribe links (I didn't
| subscribe), or, "If you don't want to hear from me again, just
| let me know", etc.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Some of it even has unsubscribe links (I didn 't subscribe),
| or, "If you don't want to hear from me again, just let me
| know", etc._
|
| I don't know if this counts as "drip marketing" (a new term
| to me), but just this week Apple spammed me with some Apple
| Card offer for Hertz car rentals.
|
| No way to unsubscribe. No link. No mention of unsubscribing
| at all. And on the Apple Card web site, no way to turn off
| marketing emails.
|
| I wish you could still report these spam's to the FTC.
| andrewl-hn wrote:
| I run my email via imap and haven't seen GMail web UI for at
| least 15 years. Apple does some minor changes to Mail app but
| generally they follow "if it ain't broke don't fix it" motto,
| and I really appreciate that. Besides, I have email from
| Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and FastMail in the same app, and I
| really appreciate that all email for me looks the same.
| dmd wrote:
| Good for you. 9999 out of 10,000 people don't know what a
| "gmail web UI" is, or even that there's something called
| email that is separate from the gmail web interface.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > web interface.
|
| Bold of you to think they know what is this.
|
| I have seen enough people who wholeheartedly though the
| things in their _phone_ stays in it and you lose access to
| them if you move to another phone.
| da_chicken wrote:
| You didn't read the post you responded to.
|
| The above poster is not talking to _end users_ about the
| web interface. The poster is talking to _you_. About the
| fact that end users don 't separate the interface from
| the thing.
|
| You are making the same argument with the same language
| to someone that made the same point.
| andrewl-hn wrote:
| True, and 10-20 years ago this seemed like a transitional
| issue: the world of technology was new and humanity needed
| time to adapt. Today I feel like some of this should be
| taught at school. Stuff like what is a browser, what is
| TLS, what are cookies, what is an email, what is phishing,
| etc. I know schools used to teach people Excel, Word and
| other office programs. Maybe they still do, and web should
| be a part of that curriculum.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Anecdotally, most of the non-tech-savvy people in my life
| use gmail via Apple's Mail app on their phone or iPad.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Same. I know so many people who just use Apple Mail and
| don't even know that there is or why they would use the
| gmail app.
| kelnos wrote:
| Pretty sure most people access their mail on their phone or
| tablet these days, either using a service-specific app, or
| a generic app like Apple Mail. I wouldn't be surprised in
| the least if many Gmail users had never used the web
| interface at all.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| I turned on Fastmail and all the AI bullshit went away for
| good. No regrets.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| A client emailed me for a meeting at Monday 2pm. The Gmail AI
| immediately marked Monday 2am on my calendar and it cannot even
| be deleted.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Wow i really hope this is a mistake, that sounds like a severe
| bug
| mort96 wrote:
| Well it's not a "bug". Language models make mistakes; it's a
| fundamental part of how they function.
| spankalee wrote:
| This isn't LLMs. Gmail has been creating calendar events
| from emails for a long time. The bug would be if the user
| can't delete the event.
| OJFord wrote:
| What makes you think it hasn't long been using a large
| language model for it though? Maybe not _L_ arge _L_
| anguage _M_ odel, the term seems to have come with
| ChatGPT et al., but Google's been doing machine learning
| for a long long time; the transformer architecture paper
| (kind of the groundwork for the current wave) was
| published by a Google team in 2017.
|
| A lot of new Google features are branded 'AI', because
| it's so hyped it has broad consumer awareness, but a lot
| of Google features for a long time have used AI and just
| been brandless or at least 'AI'-less features.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| It started about a month ago for me. I am subscribed to
| emails from an IT as a Gig platform called Field Nation.
| Thought I might pickup a bit of side work but never did.
|
| Recently it started adding them to my calendar and there
| is no way to turn off this feature without also turning
| off useful features such as package out for delivery
| notifications.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Bizarre, I can always delete things from my calendar. It sounds
| like an implementation bug. Did you report it?
| ebiester wrote:
| Since when did Google pay attention to implementation bugs?
| golem14 wrote:
| It's amazon deliveries for me. Gmail gets confused about multi-
| item orders with different delivery dates, and I cannot click
| away the banners displaying on top of the mailbox. Really poor
| UI.
|
| OTOH, it's nice to see that there is some innovation happening
| - eventually (I am an optimist) they will weed out the lousy
| stuff and keep the useful.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Could use a more reliable source for this report.
|
| I paid for and tried Google AI for Gmail and was appalled at how
| bad it is. The product team there is really not executing well.
| I've switched now to Shortwave. It works very well and having
| LLM+RAG queries for 20+ years of email archives has been very
| helpful to me.
| cpursley wrote:
| I've found the email thread summary pretty useful ymmv.
| pflenker wrote:
| Tangentially related, the AI integrated in Google Chat is
| hilariously bad. Find a thread which starts with ,,Bug: (...)"
| that has 90+ answers. Hey, an AI could be useful here! Click
| summarize. Wait. Without fail the result will be along the lines
| of ,,X, Y and Z discuss a bug."
| londons_explore wrote:
| It would be fine if you could then reply with 'no, please tell
| me about the nature of the bug not the people involved', and
| then have it remember that forever.
|
| However nearly nobody seems to correctly implement this user-
| wide memory.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yeah, you gotta watch out for this stuff. The other day I was
| using Gmail when it just gave me a million dollars. I gave it to
| charity under an assumed name.
|
| Can't screenshot without revealing the name but I think it's
| actually super cool of Google to do this. Just distributed
| charity. With no benefit to themselves.
|
| They did say that they did it based on my Google Photos showing
| that I was really good looking (can't share because of privacy)
| so there's some privacy stuff there but overall I think it's
| good.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I moved to ProtonMail right before their CEO started mouthing off
| about his dipshit opinions. I still use them because it's cheaper
| to pay for a family plan and get a VPN, password manager, and
| storage along with the email. I used to pay for each of these
| services individually and was paying 2x what I pay now
| renewiltord wrote:
| ProtonMail also does this. Someone actually told me they got an
| email from me and when I checked it said "this mail was AI
| generated". I can't screenshot it though. Personal reasons.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > I used to pay for each of these services individually and was
| paying 2x what I pay now
|
| What's the other factor though and is it worth the getting
| walled in?
|
| Password manager in my opinion has to be its own thing, has
| nothing to do with the rest, same for VPN. I can see email,
| calendar and data being close together as being beneficial in
| every day flow. That's where Fastmail for instance draws the
| line I think.
|
| If you untangle these, would the cost not be worth the benefit?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| ha ha, hey google PMs, here's a useful AI feature:
|
| > Is this e-mail marketing something?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I recently noticed that some of the emails in my gmail
| "promotions" inbox aren't emails at all, and are actually
| undeletable ads from Google.
| roryirvine wrote:
| If you're willing to use the web ui rather than the native
| app, then uBlock Origin will successfully remove those ads.
|
| Otherwise, you could always just switch the "promotions" tab
| off - the contents will show up in your main inbox, but
| without the ads.
| azhenley wrote:
| This is why I am building a better AI for my inbox.
| psygn89 wrote:
| Can it can help answer my questions on behalf of my clients that
| use gmail?
| apparent wrote:
| And yet google's spam filters still let through so much AI slop
| spam. Any email from a new sender should be suspect, and if it
| has an awkwardly phrased opt-out line ("if you'd rather not hear
| from me again, just shoot me a "leave out"") then it should
| presumptively be marked as spam.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Spam classification has virtually zero to do with the contents
| of the message.
| apparent wrote:
| I have the gmail app set to only notify me for "important
| messages," and it pretty reliably doesn't trigger a
| notification for this junk. I wish I could have it use that
| system (whatever it's using) to actually flag messages as
| spam/mass emails.
|
| If it's a seemingly personal message from an unknown sender,
| send it to spam. If it looks like a mass email (that someone
| might have signed up for), then put it in the Commercial tab
| or whatever it's called, so I can set up a filter for it or
| unsubscribe.
| notatoad wrote:
| am i missing something here, or is this really just a random two-
| sentence gripe from some guy, complaining about something that
| nobody else can reproduce?
|
| "dave is mad at gmail". okay dave.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _am i missing something here, or is this really just a random
| two-sentence gripe from some random guy, complaining about
| something that nobody else can reproduce?_
|
| You have just summarized HN, and most of social media and the
| blogosphere, in 2025.
|
| The internet is 44% angry people getting off on being angry
| about nothing.
| notatoad wrote:
| i feel like HN is usually at least a little bit better than
| this.
|
| the comments are often full of silly gripes, but they don't
| usually get voted up to the top of the homepage and stay
| there for hours
| uptown wrote:
| GMail started inserting package delivery notifications at the top
| of my inbox screen. Not exactly ideal for Christmas shopping with
| family milling about. If you turn it off, you lose the tabs for
| email categorization, so instead I wrote a CSS rule to hide it
| permanently, but it's a bad feature.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Not sure what you mean here. You can disable package status and
| still keep tabbed inbox.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Please do yourself and the world a measure of good, and stop
| using GMail. Giving someone a GMail address is like saying "Yes,
| I like to be abused, I like to be violated and have no privacy".
| It is quite embarrassing - and people who are tech-savvy should
| be telling their colleagues and peers that it is embarrassing and
| inappropriate.
|
| Yes, I realize that dropping the GMail mailbox does not mean you
| are free from GMail, because of all of the other people on it.
| But we must each make some effort to chip away at that thing.
| Twenty years ago, when Microsoft's hold on PCs was much stronger
| than it is today, online venues were inundated with derision and
| denouncement of them and their practices; but these days - it's
| as though Alphabet/Google control of all these aspects of so many
| people's lives is just neutral reality, ho-hum, nothing to waste
| time thinking about.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I'm truly thankful I deleted my Gmail account years ago and my
| smartphone has no account and no g-apps.
|
| Do we have to riot in the streets before governments regulate
| this shit?
| nichos wrote:
| Why regulate it? You don't have to use it (as you clearly moved
| elsewhere). Out of curiosity, where did you move to?
| Animats wrote:
| You have to wonder what Gmail reports about you. Does it detect
| suicidal thoughts? Child sexual abuse? Antifa activity?
| spankalee wrote:
| I've never flagged a submission before, but I just have to with
| this one.
|
| There's no evidence, no blurred-out screen shot even, no one here
| has seen this behavior in the comments, and I can't find any
| corroborating reports on the web.
|
| Who knows what's really happening or not here?
| andy99 wrote:
| Anyone remember the news story about Metallica copyrighting G
| and F chords? It's sort of like that, true or not it's so on
| brand that people just accept it, it doesn't tell you something
| you did already know about how google (or Metallica) behave.
|
| https://www.metalunderground.com/news/details.cfm?newsid=575...
| Permit wrote:
| https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/comics/1505312920-20170913%20(1)...
| andy99 wrote:
| I don't get it
| raincole wrote:
| Perfect response lol. Rare to see it's not xkcd.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Isn't this HN in a nutshell these days?
| brazukadev wrote:
| I just flagged yours because I don't think it makes any sense
| to flag the post much less posting about flagging it -
| especially when you said you are an ex-googler.
|
| Life continues, move on, defending Google enshitfication online
| after being laid off is extra work for no payment, you can
| rest.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Where I work, we get tons of feedback from customers, basically
| saying, _" How do I disable this new AI feature? I never asked
| for this."_ Yet, the guidance from leadership is very clear: _"
| More AI!"_ I suspect it's like this at Google (and everywhere
| else), too.
| glerk wrote:
| Google must have some awful PMs and designers. The worst UX
| decision I have seen recently is AI auto-dubbing all youtube
| videos by default with no way to disable this behavior globally.
| How could you miss that people can be fluent in multiple
| languages and if I click on a video in a foreign language, I most
| likely want the original soundtrack? Clearly, the intention was
| to boost some metric "X users are using this feature" with no
| regard for the actual user.
| jack_pp wrote:
| +1, this is the most annoying YouTube feature I've ever come
| across. Gave them feedback on it.. maybe more people should
| complain
| jimmyl02 wrote:
| if it increases topline metrics like watch time it's probably
| hard for them to justify removing it. a change this big seems
| like it was probably a/b tested and did move metrics
| significantly?
| cedilla wrote:
| Probably. We keep watching all kind of stuff after getting
| baited into it. AI slob is annoying, but we do want to know
| what chefs do about sticky pizza dough, or what that secret
| in the pyramids is, or how the kid reacted to what the cat
| did, or (insert your guilty pleasure here).
| xp84 wrote:
| on some platforms I try to be really good about hitting
| the "Never recommend this channel/page/whatever again"
| whenever the algo serves me the bottom-tier gutter trash
| videos, such as the "idiotic life hack that obviously
| won't work" engagement bait. It's a small drop in the
| ocean, but at least that one channel will never be served
| to me again.
| MetaMalone wrote:
| I just experienced this and was wondering why it was happening!
| wenderen wrote:
| In addition to the feature being auto-on (for me, at least) and
| unasked-for, you also need to perform multiple clicks through
| non-obvious menus (I think one of them was "Audio track"?) to
| get to the original audio. Another layer of obnoxiousness.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I don't even know how to get the original video title back...
| machomaster wrote:
| You can't. The translated titles and descriptions are
| ruined and there is nothing you as a viewer can do to fix
| it back.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > The worst UX decision I have seen recently is AI auto-dubbing
| all youtube videos by default with no way to disable this
| behavior globally.
|
| Recently anyways. The most egregious thing about Youtube, which
| is not terribly new, is the Shorts. If your video is short
| enough, it is auto-converted to a "Short", and the original
| aspect ratio gets cropped to be vertical orientation (for
| viewing on a phone, presumably).
| mikepurvis wrote:
| That is extraordinarily hostile to both creators and
| consumers.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Gotta pump those engagement metrics for shorts.
| copperroof wrote:
| The most irritating thing for me now is that YouTube doesn't
| work in my browser anymore. Clearly being a/b tested because
| sometimes it does, and sometimes it spews out thousands of
| console errors and doesn't load anything.
| Dwedit wrote:
| You don't have any old browser extensions by any chance?
| "Enhancer for YouTube" is an extension which has become
| unmaintained, and will break YouTube.
| copperroof wrote:
| No I have a few privacy plugins/adblock but they all work
| fine with YouTube normally. I tried disabling everything.
| All the standard debugging tests.
| xp84 wrote:
| Yes. Presently, with ublock origin on fairly default
| settings, YouTube causes an unresponsive tab that doesn't
| play the video, and a blast of errors on the console.
| Disabling UBO on youtube.com fixed the problem instantly
| for me (which is fine since I pay for YouTube Premium
| because it's the correct solution to the problem of "pay
| content creators and don't destroy my experience")
| rurp wrote:
| It's wild how disrespectful this is to viewers and content
| creators. Google literally couldn't care less what people
| want, it's just a machine that optimizes for whatever KPIs a
| given manager has that quarter, users be damned.
|
| Of course Google doesn't have to care about users because
| they have a dozen different monopolies. It's sad that they
| were allowed to get to this point.
| alex1138 wrote:
| I tend to raise holy hell about Whatsapp because that's
| pretty clear antitrust and Zuckerberg lied
|
| However with that also being said Google is a menace
| mtmail wrote:
| Quite happy with an extension which disables the feature (not
| happy with Youtube forcing the feature).
| https://github.com/YouG-o/YouTube-No-Translation
| bikelang wrote:
| I don't think it's just google. Modern product management feels
| broken across the whole industry. Do these guys even talk to
| customers anymore?
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Yeah, they do. It's just that the customers have changed.
| Once they were the viewers, then the advertisers, and now
| that monopoly power is secure, the "customers" of those PMs
| are the financial backers.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| I think this is where " you're the product, advertisers are
| the customers" comes in.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I complained about the same problem a while ago. There are a
| few recommendations for alternative YT interfaces that don't
| seem to be as messed up yet:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503218
|
| And apropos of nothing... there's another link on the front
| page at the moment (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850430 ) talking about
| Apple crossing the red line of customer satisfaction. This got
| me thinking... to Alphabet, you're not the customer, you're the
| product. YouTube is a sugary trap to lure eyeballs into the
| advosphere.
| xp84 wrote:
| YouTube is one of the better ones -- sort of -- in that you
| can simply pay with a very small amount of money rather than
| by wasting a ton of time on ads.
|
| Only "sort of" though since they still use the same spammy
| algorithm-driven timeline and Shorts and stuff, and are
| clearly still trying to maximize your total watch time. Given
| that I just pay a fixed fee, I wish they'd use a different
| algorithm that only seeks to keep my engagement with YouTube
| from dipping too low, rather than the default which is
| clearly designed to turn a 23-hour-a-day user into 24.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I watch about 50% Japanese content and having to switch this
| off manually has become a major source of annoyance. Bizarrely,
| if I misunderstand something in Japanese and want to go back to
| check, these _same videos_ normally don 't have any English
| subtitles available. There's auto-transcribed Japanese
| subtitles which are about 90% accurate, but they're rarely
| translated.
|
| The absolutely wild disparity in compute required to translate
| the Japanese text to English vs rendering an entirely new
| soundtrack in English blows my mind. I guess someone at Google
| thought it made sense because many people prefer dubs to subs,
| but that's on highly polished entertainment product vs
| 1-person-and-their-Japanese-vlog channels which are not aiming
| at a mass audience.
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| This happened to me for the first (and only time so far) the
| other day on a video that wasn't even in another language but
| from an guy who sometimes posts in another language (but
| usually in English) but does have a strong German (I think)
| accent. I was so confused at first and it took me a while to
| figure out what was going on as I could tell his voice was
| weird and then noticed the audio was completely out of sync.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I assume all UX designers are replaced by marketing.
| w-m wrote:
| Go to your Google account settings; add the languages you speak
| and don't want auto translations for in your personal profile.
|
| I agree that the auto dubbing is the worst feature. It may have
| been HN where I read the above tip to turn that off, it seems
| to have worked for me so far.
| forgotTheLast wrote:
| Reddit does the same for comment. It's on by default and the
| quality of translations isn't good. Completely jarring
| raincole wrote:
| Reddit has machine-translated their whole site in different
| languages and made these translated versions google-indexed.
| That polluted google result severely. As if google weren't
| bad enough today.
| estebarb wrote:
| Something I noticed recently is that titles of youtube videos are
| automatically translated.
|
| I'm convinced that nobody in Google speaks more than one
| language, otherwise they would have never done that. It is
| impossible to turn off the unsolicited translations in search,
| and now youtube. I'm scared that soon they will force up audio
| translation as well.
| machomaster wrote:
| It's not only the titles, but the descriptions as well. And
| viewers can't turn this behavior off, only the channel creator
| can and most will not.
| randerson wrote:
| I've been a long-time Gmail user with a paid plan. But recently
| two issues are annoying me enough that I'm considering leaving:
|
| 1. The incessant "Using Gmail to run your business?" upsells. No,
| I'm unemployed and this is a personal account. Unlike the AI
| upsell, I can't seem to dismiss this permanently. It just snoozes
| it until the next time I open it.
|
| 2. The Search bar has become dangerously glitchy (at least in
| Firefox for Mac) if you type fast and have keyboard shortcuts on.
| It lets me type 1 or 2 characters before it starts treating every
| character as a shortcut, inadvertently deleting, muting,
| archiving emails. Search is what sets Gmail apart and now it is
| unusable. I reported this bug to Google months ago and my
| patience is running thin.
| thunderbong wrote:
| I've always found the Gmail search bar glitchy on Firefox but
| never on Chrome browsers.
|
| I'll be typing something in the search box and suddenly I'll
| end up navigating somewhere with the keyboard focus having
| gotten removed from there.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| I can see how it is useful: for some people, reading and writing
| emails is a dreadful activity. But it is also an important facet
| of every human activity -- communication. So, it better be
| intentional and clear. I have turned off all smart features and
| let me handle how to say what I want to say.
| troyvit wrote:
| Man I was in a Google News Initiative meeting and they started
| with a "fun poll" where they asked how you'd feel if you read
| an email that you knew was written by AI. Lots of people didn't
| mind knowing that was the case, and it was mainly for the
| reasons you put out writing emails is legit not fun for a lot
| of people.
|
| Man I was so triggered though, like old-man-yelling-at-clouds
| level. Then I went back through gmail and exactly one of the
| last 50 most recent emails I've received was not an alert or a
| newsletter or an invite. IOW out of my last 50 emails only one
| of them would've fit the bill for an AI-written correspondence
| taking the place of a human-written one. All that butt-hurt and
| it doesn't even matter.
|
| So long way of getting around to saying that your point about
| intentionality and clarity is clutch, and if people can get
| that with AI-written emails maybe I can cool my jets.
| butz wrote:
| Is there a way to suspend/disable Gmail account in a way, that no
| bad actors could overtake it, after Google disables/deletes(?) it
| after period of two years?
| david_van_loon wrote:
| I've seen no indications of this supposed feature in my own
| experience or other sources. The article does not provide any
| evidence to support its claims.
| phyzome wrote:
| ...I'm confused, is there something I'm missing in this post? I
| only see 4 sentences, with almost no information.
| havaloc wrote:
| One of my tech clients emailed me about a Roku problem and one of
| the AI suggestions in Gmail was to tell the customer to try
| unplugging a Roku for a minute and plugging it back in. I pressed
| that button, proofread the suggested text, and hit send.
|
| In truth it felt both amazing and made me uneasy, for AI was
| encroaching on my career of telling people to reboot their errant
| device.
| isaachinman wrote:
| For anyone looking for a cross-platform, local-first IMAP email
| client that "just works" and doesn't jam AI down your throat,
| check us out:
|
| https://marcoapp.io
| stOneskull wrote:
| i do about 95% of my emailing in thunderbird on my computer,
| and 5% in the gmail app on my phone or on the specific email's
| website. all imap so they're basically synced already. i'm
| wondering if your marco app will be useful for my use case, and
| what the benefits would be. i think i would lose some benefits
| such as thunderbird extensions. also, to use proton mail on my
| phone i think i need the protonmail app. i use the proton
| bridge to use it in thunderbird. would the marco app work with
| proton on computer but not on phone?
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| All this AI is great. What I really want is to clean up my inbox
| by seeing where the mails are coming from. What I want is `select
| sender, count(*) from emails group by 1 order by 2 desc` or the
| equivalent. But I guess that doesn't juice the stock price like
| AI does.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Stop using Google products.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Do one thing and do it well, you assholes
|
| Be dumb pipes
|
| Google has already arguably ruined Youtube, which they own, over
| a period of many, many years
|
| It doesn't matter if the community does all the work, the company
| will MITM themselves to make themselves look more important than
| they are
| raincole wrote:
| I'll save you a click:
|
| > Gmail doesn't just offer to write your emails for you, they
| actually do it, and it's up to you to delete the text it wrote.
|
| > Hard to make a screen shot to demo without revealing personal
| info. That's how awful this thing is.
|
| > It reeks of desperation.
|
| This is _the whole article_. That 's it. No screenshot. No
| details. Nothing. Just three random sentences.
|
| 200+ upvote on HN btw.
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