Google Forcing Gemini Down Our Throats Feels aLot Like Microsoft and Internet Explorer, But More Insidious
Opting out should not be a premium feature. It’s a basic right.
to be fair, Microsoft is also shoving Copilot down our throats. They keep adding unremovable Copilot buttons to Outlook.com
We don't "get" tech anymore. Tech happens to/at us. We are already getting AI generated ads. Where are the AI based ad blockers?
Google was "cool" 2 decades ago... or before they combined both monetization (through ad) with power (through monopoly) they inexorably transformed EXACTLY to Microsoft the same way Facebook/Meta did the Google playbook.
Those huge tech corporations are pulled by the market to follow the same, sadly successful, strategy playbook and keep no uniqueness.
Google has been the new Microsoft for years already but through careful marketing consumers somehow believe they aren't.
I'm being serious with this comment. In no way have I felt like Google has forced Gemini on me. I barely notice it exists. Can anyone give me examples?
They’ve stuffed it into every page in Google cloud and workspace.
I tried it in sheets one time and it literally made up fake data for my analysis. Never trusting that again.
Ah, I don't use most of Google's services, though I do use an Android device. I think my most used service is Drive. I haven't seen it on there.
I accidentally clicked on their stupid popup one time and then got emails over and over welcoming me to Gemini. I don't even have Google assistant installed.
Gemini 'messaged' me in google messages introducing itself a couple months ago. Just appeared like a normal text conversation with any other contact, but as soon as you click on it you're presented with a wall of T&Cs.
Deleted the 'conversation' and it's stayed gone; though there's an option for it in settings.
The only other place I've see it is an on-screen reminder every time I use Google Assistant. (usually just triggering home automatons)
My job uses the Google suite and it feels like it’s gotten a bit excessive recently. Just this week I have gotten multiple popups on my work email and in Docs and Sheets. It has been present in Chat for a few months.
Interesting. I don't use Gmail (unless I have to) or the Google office suite. Makes sense.
They "remind me" every time I use assistant on my phone with an on screen message. But that's about it and though I find it annoying I don't feel forced.
Same here tbh. I havea university google suite account and I've never noticed it there. I also use Google messages, and there was a button for it by default, but it was easily disabled.
My power button on my phone now opens Gemini... Every damn time it's bumped. Press to wake the phone? Oh hello Gemini
Well that is annoying, but doesn't sound like the expected behaviour of the power button. A long press, maybe, but just pressing it shouldn't do that.
for months, every time i used google assistant to set a timer, and every few days without asking, i got push messages to use gemini instead of assistant on my phone. there is no way to disable those messages - they only go away if you have at least once activated gemini. btw, assistant functions like the timer DO NOT WORK if you use gemini; it's really great service to push your costumers to install a feature to take away a feature that is used daily.
I actually did activate it to test that now, because I thought there is no way they'd leave that out... And it works! It set me a timer.
But yeah, that's annoying. Very.
When AI appeared in my android text messaging app was the day I relented and installed GrapheneOS. Between Graphene and Bazzite on laptop/desktop, and NixOS for homelab/self hosted tools,.couldn't be happier to be free from all big tech BS while still getting tech benefits on my own terms
All of it is. Or pushing copilot into all Microsoft products like anyone is using this shit.
Problem with Gemini is that is sucks badly in comparison with more mature solutions.
It really is terrible. I've tried a dozen times to get it to do anything that the free version of GPT can do...fails every time on the few things it even tries.
Wanted to say it feels like Microsoft doing same thing with Copilot, but at least you can disable that. At least on enterprise plans, home / small business apperently is a different story now.
I wasn't able to disable Copilot in Office without threatening to cancel via my account management page. It's only then that they give you the option to fall back to the originally priced plan that specifically doesn't include Copilot. And even after that, Copilot apparently won't be removed from my locally installed copies of the Office apps until my plan renewal date in April! I'm pretty sure I'm gonna use the time to transition all my documents to LibreOffice and fully cancel my MS Office plan before it renews.
there is nothing forcing you to keep using google though
For now
Somehow I've never come across any of these things in my day to day. I hope I can casually avoid them for a long long time.
That's how it is. I never even set up Gemini when my phone updated. I never used google assistant either.
They're laying down the road and try to get you to use it. The toll booths come soon enough when every alternative gets blocked as much as possible.
Use a hardened Firefox, use a different search engine
I don't even have chrome installed. I use Firefox and Duckduckgo. It in android phones and gsuite products that people have to use for work.You have to go to extreme lengths to uninstall on desktop as outlined in the article, and cannot uninstall or opt out of on android.
My power button on my phone now opens Gemini... Every damn time it's bumped. Press to wake? Oh hello Gemini
Install LineageOS or e/os/ on your phone and bye bye Gemini 🙂
I just tried it for the first time. I like how it tried to educate me
I didn't like the verbosity overall
It felt dumb that using it via android studio it didn't have any capacity. It didn't know I was building for android. It couldn't implement any of its own suggestions and a lot of the suggestions were incomplete.
After asking chatgpt, Gemini and deepseek I still can't get Godot to build an android export that contains the sqlite shared object accessible to the code.
I'm losing my mind.