Google Forcing Gemini Down Our Throats Feels aLot Like Microsoft and Internet Explorer, But More Insidious
Google Quietly Installed A.I. to My Workspace. Getting Rid of It Was Creepy.
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?
Already happened. It died because it turns out the AI was funneling all of your browsing data to the servers running the AI instead
GPT-AdBlocker for Chrome promises to block all ads, including ads in videos - gHacks Tech News - https://www.ghacks.net/2023/07/19/gpt-adblocker-for-chrome-promises-to-block-all-ads-including-ads-in-videos/
They'd be useless. Unless you trained it yourself there would 100% be a whitelist you couldn't see, or it'd be gobbling up all your data.
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.
Google is slipping. Duck duck go is a better search engine. There are better mail systems as well. Meta is done as well.
This is probably the most 'old man yells at cloud' thing about me but I hate voice assistants and they have yet to work consistently enough to be worth my time.
It is completely insane to me that something simple like "Add ____ to the grocery list" has worked and stopped working multiple times for years now. How hard is that to get right? Cannot believe such a simple action is so inconsistent.
I think a lot of that has to do with that Google used to be a company with engineers wanting to make the best software.
Now it's an ad agency that happens to have some software to make money, and they don't care about the software anymore. Money is not only bottom line, it's all the lines. You see the results in the quality of their software, it's all gone down hill.
My Google smart speaker used to integrate with my shopping list app. The loss of that integration and other features makes it basically a glorified white noise machine now.
Nah dude you're right. I have mine disabled and nuked as best as possible on my phone. I have no nest. No Google assistance puck. No Alexa. My home is not a smart home. There is a gun and a bottle of wild turkey next to my printer, and sometimes I make threats to it to ensure all my machines stay in line.
That's my biggest gripe with Gemini; it's not a proper replacement for Google Assistant and yet it's still treated as such.
Feels like Google took at least two steps back when it comes to Gemini on Pixel devices...
I love the dedicated piracy folder lmao
Or I ask to go to Costco, and where Assistant previously would route me to the nearest one, Gemini sends me to one 80 miles away
They just slapped an LLM which tried to replace Google Assistant where the said LLM could not even do the most basic functions like setting up an alarm.
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
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.
It "messaged" me in Google Messages today introducing itself and how it could summarize text messages on my phone for me
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.
@atrielienz @ObviouslyNotBanana If you use their Search and don't want all the AI results forced to top of results you can try using UDM14 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14-trick-lets-you-kill-ai-search-for-good/
They remind me even when I don't use assistant. I sometimes wake my phone and it's the first screen I saw. I tried switching over and it sucks. Sometimes I say a voice command for something regarding google home (eg. Turn off the lights). Sometimes it correctly realized this is mean for Google home and will execute the command with Google home. Sometimes I get an error saying Gemini can't do that yet. This is with the same exact prompt. It's not idempotent.
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.
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.
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.
Thats nothing, the Play Integrity API is trying to block usage by other operating systems like CalyxOS and Graphene. Imo much more insidious and opaque.
Ewwww
there is nothing forcing you to keep using google though
For now
All of it is. Or pushing copilot into all Microsoft products like anyone is using this shit.
Every time I've opened an Office app this week it has given me some copilot welcome screen and opened it's own sidebar. I tried to use it to proofread a word doc and got prompted to purchase a license. So they basically just filled 1/3 of my screen with an ad.
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.
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.
I'm slowly moving away from Gmail and Google Docs/Drive, but in the meantime entering this into uBlock Origin seems to help:
mail.google.com##div[jscontroller][jsaction]:has(> span > button[aria-label="Try Gemini"])
drive.google.com##div[jscontroller][jsaction]:has(> span > button[aria-label="Try Gemini"])
docs.google.com##div[jscontroller][jsaction]:has(> span > button[aria-label="Try Gemini"])
AAAAAria to save the day!
I tried to ask it how I could remove it, Gemini told me that in order for me to help it I needed to active some of the "smart" features I didn't have active on my account, essentially helping do the opposite. It follows the ever increasing practice of trying to shove basically illegal behavior into "it's just the algorithm, bro, there was no intent!"
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.
Where are they putting it, chrome? Just use Firefox instead.
My employer is switching from Microsoft to Google for office tools next month and they’ve been championing its availability to all of us. I’m not looking forward to it…
The article in this post tells the only way to get rid of it. If you use it for corporate, your IT people have to call and ask Google support to add the setting for you to be able to turn it off.
It is also on android phones and can't be uninstalled or disabled.
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.
Every Google Drive action I do now is shifted over 20% for ✨
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.
The good news is that this may cure my laziness. I've been preparing to leave most of google service for a while now.
Is it bad that I stopped using Google docs and plan on moving to OpenOffice instead?
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.
to be fair, Microsoft is also shoving Copilot down our throats. They keep adding unremovable Copilot buttons to Outlook.com
I would say that neither corporation forcing AI on us is fair by any stretch
Oof, luckily I don't have to use o365 at work anymore.
It is one of the few useful usecases tho. It can summarize meetings if transcribe is on.
But can it summarise them correctly?