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.
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.
I would be ok with it being like a person, more like an acquaintance at work maybe. Specifically meaning I would be ok with having the AI know about me only based on what I’ve said to it.
But none of this surveillance economy stuff. And the AI model can be no snitch to big ad tech.
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, these 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.”
No it has been implemented long 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 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.
That’s true, these supposedly intelligent systems are really stupid about this stuff still. Especially with limited room to store that additional ever growing context about you.
I wasn’t accounting for quality, and it’s bad right now for this. And I’m skeptical it will get better. The models need to be tactful about using accumulated knowledge about the person driving.
I can’t help but feel my descriptions getting more and more similar to just describing a competent person. And, I’m aware I’m being idealistic and what I’m OK with won’t be a product any time soon.
I guess it would be fully on device, encrypted at rest and have a perfectly good memory of our conversations and it would be tactful in bringing in knowledge into conversations. I dunno, I’m just describing the ideal personal assistant AI. And many people would make it a companion. And… yeah, anyway. Surveillance capitalism and pervasive advertising is bad.