I did this (disabled AI features) and lost smart inbox and it honestly improved the experience: it made me realise how much rubbish I was subscribed to that I never read, so I unsubbed and blocked tons of stuff, and now my inbox is clear again

It is absurd. I disabled Gemini for my organization, and Google in return disables tab completion in gmail entirely. They are practically demanding I find an alternative at this point.

>> When I subscribed, these features were provided by traditional ML, perhaps some BERT-like encoder architecture at most, however now I cannot keep that previous functionality if I don't wish to grant LLMs access to my data.

Sorry for the sidetrack, but why is it so common to consider BERT something else than an LLM? It is one of the earliest LLMs so it's nowhere near the size of more recent ones, but even wikipedia classifies it as an LLM:

  Bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT)
  Original author Google AI
  Release October 31, 2018[1]
  Type 

    Large language model
    Transformer
    Foundation model

  License Apache 2.0
  Website arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805 
  Repository github.com/google-research/bert

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BERT_(language_model)

And in any case it's an autoregressively-trained Transformer, albeit encoder-only. If it's not an LLM, then what is it?

BERT is an LLM. I don't see why Google needs to cater to increasingly fine parsing of politically acceptable vs. not ML workflows, because that is really what this is about.

TIL you can turn off ai features!

for those who didn't know how to do it:

1. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general

2. under "Smart features:", toggle off "Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet"

You need to do this to continue to use Google Assistant for some features as well! One day I try to set a timer on my phone, which is basically all I use the voice features for, and it forced me into Gemini AND data collection. It's truly maddening.

It's more likely that they replaced the traditional ML models with generative AI ones so there's not really a way to go back and disable only one part so to speak.

>Google/Alphabet is conflating GenAI/LLMs with traditional machine learning

I see people try so hard to make this distinction when it really doesn't exist. Transformers are only a little different than long short-term-memory architecture (parallelized, with attention mechanism and no recurrance).

What is the point at which is departed from tradition machine learning? Seems more like people retrofitting a moral decision to not like LLMs and trying to dress it up as a technical distinction.

Services want you to behave a certain way. You can only work around them for so long. The solution is to abstain or acquiesce.

I just abandoned my 22yo gmail account. I feel liberated and empowered!

I found all of the new LLM features to be utterly pointless and incredibly annoying, but the last straw was when my account was abruptly locked recently. For a week I couldn't access mail, maps, photos, digital picture frames for my extended family all went dark, my personal blog ... all shut down with no reason given. No customer support available to contact to resolve google's mistake. A week later, it was suddenly unlocked again. Still no reason given.

Fuck google. You are not their customer; you are their product. Google doesn't care about you any more than Tyson cares about the chickens it sells.

Glad they did this change. It forced me to make actual filters rather than relying on gmail to filter to broad categories. Much better in the long run. Also I finally unsubscribed from things I would let go into promos and social but never read.

Why didn't you expect Google to employ dark patterns? They're pioneers of dark patterns in software. They've probably done more than any other company except Meta to spread and advance these techniques.

It might seem simple in the current moment to separate the two, but all of these features are going to start merging. Google isn't going to maintain "old" ML features.

Turning all of their features off is the only way I achieved Inbox 0.

Your mileage may vary!

I'm just glad they haven't shoved AI down Google Tasks yet

On a similar note, I recently had to enable GenAI in my Photos app just to be able to search my photos, and the photo search is now worse than I remember it being before! I need to move off Google entirely for backups but I find the cross-device compatibility and convenience of the ecosystem really hard to give up. Lately, I've started using other LLM plans than Gemini just to have some of my personal details separate from the rest of Google, which has all my documents and email, etc.

I hope that enshitification calms down a bit whenever the dust has settled on frontier AI companies and we no longer have to force this into every product imaginable. Google used to be pretty good relative to the rest of the big ad tech companies (looking at Meta/Facebook with a scowl...) at giving opt-outs and settings to personalize privacy stuff. This has been a disappointing change to see

I blame the European regulations that drove the featureset. The problem with the legal department being the primary feature stakeholder is that usability will always be crap.

They can enshittify their product as much as they want, it just makes the case for removing every piece of Google garbage out of my life and never using a single piece of software from them.

> I believe bundling these options together shouldn't be legal

What could that law possibly look like? Do politicians get to decide on all other features corporations group together, or just ML features, and why?

You do know you can just not use gmail. I don't.