Often with news about information technology, I’m the guy who likes to step back, look into the details, understand the specifics, and try to have some measured perspective on things.
But I have to say that this headline and subheading on Kevin Roose’s NYT article about Google’s Bard is the kind of thing that sets off a panic: “Google’s Bard Just Got More Powerful. It’s Still Erratic. The chatbot now pulls information from a user’s Gmail, Google Docs and Google Drive accounts.”
Say what now? You’re working on an AI that tries to talk to me or with me or for me by looking at my documents to train itself?
I do not want an AI assistant to “see my calendar, peer into my email inbox or rifle through my online shopping history”. Do. Not. Want.
Roose seems to think that fixes an annoying problem with Bard. Either he’s getting paid off or he’s not in touch with what most people want. Most people do not want a robot assistant who tells them, “On December 5th, you wrote an angry email draft to a colleague. Would you like me to rewrite that email and send it today, December 15?” I do not want Google to say, “I see you were dreaming of a trip to Paris when you emailed your wife this week about air fares. Would you like me to recommend a restaurant in the Latin Quarter that I know you’ll like?”
Nobody wants Clippy. Nobody ever wanted Clippy. Stop trying to make Clippy happen. If Kevin Roose wants a Clippy, he should hire a human being to polish his shoes and read his calendar back to him.
I don’t care that the company now says that it won’t be using my personal data to train the general AI; the fact that they’re working in this direction means they’ve already done that without telling anybody or they’re planning to at some point.
I’ve been perhaps too indifferent to Google for a large portion of my digital life. Even after they plainly stopped believing in “Don’t be evil” and as they started to drift towards “No, go ahead, be evil” I’ve tended to look past their behavior. I’ve left Twitter/X, I’ve radically reduced my participation on Facebook, I’ve used Amazon less, but I haven’t seriously reconsidered the integration of Google’s products into my workflow.
Until now.
But I also want a better class of technology writer in the mainstream press. Roose mentions privacy issues almost in passing, as a minor technical issue to be ironed out. He doesn’t really pause to ask whether the basic idea of Bard that he’s describing is anything that most people want, in part because he assumes that want it or not, it’s going to happen to you. But I’ve never heard of anything I want less from information technology than Bard as it appears in this article.
I’d rather buy a vintage Juicero and pay for the now-nonexistent subscription service.