mccMar 12

Google Mail / "GMail" has no fewer than nine settings for "Smart Features and Personalization", e.g., Gemini. I have these all turned off in order to prevent Gemini ingesting my emails. To do this, you now have to opt out of benign machine-learning or even pattern-matching-based features, like sorting promotional emails from regular ones or spellcheck.

Despite this, as of today, Google is offering a Gemini smart compose feature on all my emails, despite me having turned off smart compose.

Show threadmccMar 12
Related, consider the Android "Messages" app. This has checkbox settings for "Smart Reply"; two additional checkboxes for "suggestions" of stickers and "actions"; and a fourth checkbox, "Gemini in Messages", for explicitly turning off Gemini. I have turned off all of these. Despite this, this week I discovered that if I long-press or open ANY image in Messages, there are two buttons, "Remix" and "Create", which Google's documentation explicitly says network-sends the image to, quote, "Gemini".
Show threadmccMar 12

Now one *assumes* these buttons don't activate unless pressed, but there's a problem. First, the checkbox to disable "Gemini" in Messages itself only turned off an activate-on-select button. Second, on a phone— where "scroll" and "tap" are both taps— accidental activation of buttons is a part of life.

This happens to me again and again, with Google, with Copilot in VS Code, with everything. A company adds an "AI"-branded feature with an off switch, you turn it off, they later enable it anyway.

Show threadmccMar 12
The repeated lesson here is that a company, organization, computer program, or person who uses the privacy, environmental, and trust disaster sold as "generative AI" for one thing, can no longer be trusted for any thing. If it is tolerated for one thing, it will eventually be used for all things. If a program adds an optional "AI"-branded feature you *have* to stop using that program completely, because if (when) the company feels the use metrics are too low they will stop making it optional.
Show threadGlyphMar 12
@mcc I am struggling to cope with the intersection of this true thing that you have said, and the other true fact that this phenomenon is engulfing all software at breathtaking speed https://floss.social/@soller/116217334800540296
Jeremy Soller 🦀 (@[email protected])

LLM slop is just one part of the broader systemd/Linux sloperating system. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/AGENTS.md

FLOSS.social
Show threadGlyph
@mcc I realize that there’s a small difference between “developed by LLMs” and “LLMs embedded in it” but I believe your observation largely extends across this barrier as well
Mar 12 at 9:47pmToot!
Show threadGlyphMar 12
@mcc I feel like “stop using software entirely” isn’t really an option for me, particularly as the most concerning software is going to be used *upon* me regardless of my own choices.
Show threadGlyphMar 12
@mcc gosh this sucks ass
Show threadmccMar 12
@glyph It is possible I am willing to stop being a part of the world to a greater extent than you are.
Show threadBillMar 13
@glyph You do what you can. I made my line "directly embedded is what gets me off of the stuff", because otherwise I'd go insane trying to find solutions to the problem.
Show threadmccMar 12
@glyph No, I do not believe there is