Google offers bargain: Sell your soul to Gemini, and it'll give you smarter answers

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨throws_lemy@reddthat.com⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/14/google_gemini_personalize_responses/

Google on Wednesday began inviting Gemini users to let its chatbot read their Gmail, Photos, Search history, and YouTube data in exchange for possibly more personalized responses.

Josh Woodward, VP of Google Labs, Gemini and AI Studio, announced the beta availability of Personal Intelligence in the US. Access will roll out over the next week to US-based Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers.

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NarrativeBear@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
No one wants this at all.

They have been shoveling Gemini into all the smart speakers and Android Auto. Gemini can’t get anything correct.

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- Drusas@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I was reluctant to "upgrade", but since that was forced, I've been using my smart speakers a lot more. Gemini can be helpful and (fairly--make sure your can sanity check) accurate.
  
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  - Serinus@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    It’s always going to sound accurate. That’s what’s it’s built to do. It’s just that often the easiest way to sound accurate is to be accurate, but not always. Shortly after you forget that it’s going to fuck you.
    
    Better not forget.
    
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MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Mates, I’m positively effusive about AI compared to your average Lemmster. But I can’t for the life of me figure out why I would want personalized AI any more than I want personalized ads. Which is zero — that’s the amount of corporate-personalized shit I want in my life.

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- paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I would be ok with it being like a person, more like an acquaintance at work maybe. Specifically having the AI know about me only based on what I’ve said.
  
  But none of this surveillance economy stuff. And the AI model can be no snitch to big ad tech.
  
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  - setsubyou@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Even that is just confusing. I sometimes use Perplexity (because Pro comes with my bank account - neobanks have zero focus). And by default it remembers things you say. So when I ask a question sometimes it will randomly decide to bring in something I else I asked about before. E.g. I sometimes use it to look up programming related stuff, and then when I ask something else it will randomly research whatever language it thinks I like now in that context too and do things like suggest an anime based on my recent interest in Rust for no good reason.
    
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  - Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I’m sure that’ll be a tiered pay option soon enough. $10 a month gets you an ai that’s just an acquaintance. Doesn’t “care”, forgets your name sometimes, doesn’t remember that thing you talked about last week. $50 a month gets you your ai best friend. It “cares”, remembers everything about you, makes suggestions based on what it knows about you, even goes out of it’s way to prompt you first and ask you how your dentist appt went.
    
    In my opinion ai is in the “drug dealer wandering around the club giving a free bump” phase. Once people get addicted and sew it into the fabric of every day life, thes3 companies will up the price, make the cheaper tiers too frustrating to use, and charge up the ass. “Oh, you’ve got an ai boyfriend? Let’s see how much you’ll pay to keep it or have it lobotomized.”
    
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- Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I would love an AI that was personalized to me and could answer the questions I want rather than shitting out generic shit that barely applies to my question. Something that knows me enough to help me with all the shit I don’t remember or have the energy to make myself start. That’s something I’ve dreamed about ever since I saw it in scifi media.
  
  But I want to OWN and CONTROL the data and the way the AI handles the data. Corpo AI is just opening your shirt and telling them where to swing the golf club.
  
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  - MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I can see that, but also if I don’t own the AI, then knowledge it has about me could be used to manipulate me maybe in ways too subtle for me to notice.
    
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- MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  the amount of corporate-personalized shit I want in my life
  
  would be zero when unsolicited. Don’t send me SMS, don’t send me e-mails, NEVER have my home speaker announce things I didn’t explicitly ask for.
  
  However, when I search for things, make requests of “the cloud” to bring me information, I do appreciate having my personal history influence those results. I don’t want to sift through all the NFL, NBA, NHL, etc. score results and commentary just to get a weather forecast. I don’t want to see all the “big celebrity / entertainment news” mixed in with my local news. And, this means that some degree of customization of my feeds and search results is necessary to steer those results to my preferences.
  
  Would I appreciate having more direct, intuitive, transparent control of the filtering? Hell yes. Is anybody offering anything better than Google out there right now? Very few, and mostly of very limited capability. Please prove me wrong with links to examples in your responses.
  
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  - MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Lemmy doesn’t have an algorithm that feeds me just the things I want to see. I have to shape it. I have to block people and subscribe to boards. And I have largely deterministic control over what I see.
    
    But look at Facebook. Look at Twitter. Look at YouTube. Look at … gestures at everything. It’s obvious that personalized services manipulate people to their detriment. They make people hate one another. They make people hate themselves.
    
    But that’s not even my personal objection, really I’m an AI enthusiast. I’ll have entire conversations just to see how it will react. I’ve jailbroken them. I’ve run identical scenarios over and over for countless hours just to tweak prompts to be slightly better. And I want a blank slate when I talk to AI. I want to tell it exactly what it needs to know about me to answer a given question, and no more.
    
    Because as we can see, an algorithm that really understands what we want to see and tweaks every single response to match — is manipulating us. And I don’t want to be manipulated. I want my thoughts, such as they are, to be my own.
    
    I do appreciate
    
    I don’t want
    
    I can’t prove you wrong. If you are happy with a machine picking what you get exposed to, then you’ll do that and be happy. But I know how thoughts can be manipulated, and I know I’m not immune, so yeah, I don’t want AI that I don’t strictly control the context of. I don’t want my thoughts shaped by how the AI believes someone like me could most effectively be steered in a desired direction. Because I look around me and I know it can. If not to me then to thousands of others
    
    But you do you. I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone my opinion is the only correct one.
    
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LostWanderer@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Eww, that's the worse trade that one could possibly do. ROFL Given how much of a fail "AI" is at the moment, they could never deliver anything substantial with such a trade.

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Tikiporch@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
No one wants personalized answers. They want smart answers, like what was promised: talking to a professor. The promise of AI was to help me look smart on the internet. I’m a dumbass, why would I want you to tell me more dumbass things?

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deliriousdreams@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
There's a lot of people claiming "no one wants this".

Thing is, people loved this when they introduced it with Google Now back in 2012. They literally used to trawl your inbox and tell you when to expect packages, when you had appointments, when your flight and hotel were booked for/when to leave for the airport.

All of that was useful information and it was free. Later their assistant could call to book you a table at a restaurant or add things to your shopping list or whatever. Some of this functionality started off very clunky, but it could absolutely be useful. But slowly but surely people started realizing that they were the product and that in order for Google Now and assistant to do this stuff it had to be reading emails and processing information in the cloud. We didn't have devices that could do that kind of processing on phone.

After backlash (and likely because it wasn't making them any money because they hadn't figured out how to monetize the product yet), Google got rid of Google Now and Google Assistant took over.

it did some of the same things but distracted users from what was missing with flashy new hardware and smart home things. Lots of people loved that stuff too.

Then Sonos sued and forced them to kneecap their products. Suddenly the honeymoon was over in a big way. Some of the most basic smart home features were broken and in such a way that people who used them were irate.

Some of those integrations and functionality returned eventually. But right in the middle of that Google launched Gemini and it sucked at most all of it. It keeps getting "better" supposedly. But for a lot of smart home users the magic has been lost. They want what they had and lost and Gemini isn't even a reasonable facsimile of that.

So it's more that people are frustrated with Gemini and angry at Google for killing another service they found useful.

People still want technology to make their lives easier and more efficient. But they also want privacy and for things to just work. Google hasn't made a product that just worked in a long time and AI isn't going to be it.

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- criss_cross@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I was gonna say I do know quite a few coworkers that love all this stuff.
  
  I despise it with the passion of 1000 suns but it’s not universal.
  
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- KeenFlame@feddit.nu ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  You mean for you. That this was your experience. Not “many people”. Many people don’t attribute conspiracy like planning to the megacorporate give, most understand that no matter the ceo the goal was always, for any “free” service to make you the product. Many people took that deal
  
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  - deliriousdreams@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Lots of people who have taken to the internet at large may not understand the root cause of why, but they do know Google's reputation for killing projects and enshittification. That discussion is happening everywhere. And you should also note that a lot of the early adopters of Google Now and Google Assistant (including the hardware) are tech enthusiasts who absolutely did have the realization at one point or another about how these companies were essentially rifling through their emails and other information they were collecting in order to provide such detailed information. There were multiple articles about it (from outlets and blogs that these kinds of people follow). Perhaps once Google assistant became more mainstream (where people were more likely to pick up assistant enabled devices and such in Target or the like), those people didn't realize. But they still see the enshittification.
    
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Etterra@discuss.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Hmm how about you go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself.

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itisileclerk@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Gemini is LLM non grata.

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db2@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers

Gross.

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floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
“More personalised responses” means more finely tuned to influence your behaviour, not “smarter answers”

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aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Gemini has no answers I’m seeking. But thanks!

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ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I think this is the future, but it will be local, open source AI that you control that will be how it takes off. sure the corporate AIs will be more convenient, but I sense that people can “feel” that corporate in their AI and this will be a trust barrier. It is the same thing with the Metaverse. You can feel Zuck’s Metaverse is corporate in a way you do not feel on a flat screen and it is objectionable to most even if they cannot put their finger on why. AI and the Metaverse are personal, more in your face and more present which tickles something in your brain that demands that those you let in, you can trust.

I am not sure what this wall should be called c but as it becomes more apparent, it will get a name. Anyone got a suggestions?

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- ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Maybe “Inner Circle Rejection”.
  
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tja@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
They are already doing it right now. If you don’t want them to train in your data, you have to turn off history.

If you turn off history, suddenly all integrations, also on your phone, don’t work anymore. Like creating reminders or the shopping list integration etc.

I just want Google Assistant back.

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fubarx@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
lemmy.world/post/41640680

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Cybersteel@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The trick that they don’t tell you is that you don’t own your soul, it belongs to god while the body is owned by the state. It’s a reason why in most places suicide is a crime, you’re damaging the state’s property.

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Kanda@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Don’t they already have this if you’re a Google user? Just update the terms and conditions that nobody reads

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Disgruntled@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Josh Woodward (Musician)

For a minute there I thought it was THIS Josh Woodward. I remember years ago he had long hair and YouTube made him cut his hair to be some special content creator that they were offering back then.

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