A.I. has been added to Gmail. What You Need to Know
Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence assistant, can do new things like make a to-do list based on recent emails. Your privacy could be affected. When it started displaying AI-generated answers to questions at the top of search results about two years ago, Google almost forced artificial intelligence on the masses. Now the company is taking a similar tack by adding A.I. into another ubiquitously used service, Google Mail.
In order to assist users in managing their overflowing inboxes and speed up the process of writing email, Google launched a suite of new tools this month that are based on generative artificial intelligence (AI), the same technology that powers chatbots. Some of the features are free, while others require paying a subscription.
Users of Gmail can now type a question into the search bar to look up emails, such as “What’s the name of the job recruiter I met last month?” Additionally, Google is testing a brand-new type of inbox that will be made available later this year and automatically compiles a to-do list based on the items discussed in emails. In addition, Google unveiled tools to streamline writing, including an automatic proofreader and response generator.
This could be the biggest change to email, our most steadfast web service, in decades if users of Gmail adopt the new AI technology. It might make it less time-consuming for people to manually check their inboxes throughout the day and more of an overview that they look at periodically. Naturally, all of this has an impact on privacy.
Google is essentially attempting to upend its established search business before upstart A.I. with the launch of its new search engine, A.I. Mode. It can be disrupted by rivals. For The New York Times, credit goes to Mike Kai Chen.
To make the new features work, Gemini, Google’s A.I. assistant, needs access to a user’s entire inbox. While our emails are being analyzed by Gemini systems, the company insists that safeguards are in place to prevent employees from reading them. To understand what this means for us, I interviewed a Google executive overseeing Gmail as well as privacy experts.
And to assess whether the tools are worth the potential trade-off in privacy, I tested Google’s A.I.-ified Gmail for the last week. I found a few of these features, especially the automatic to-do list generated from my inbox, very useful, but I didn’t care for the tools that sped up writing. In the end, I’m not sure if I will choose to share even more data with Google to use these features when they are all available. Here’s a rundown of first impressions of the new tools and answers to important questions about privacy going forward.
Gmail enters the A.I. era
First, let’s talk about the most significant new feature, AI Inbox, which will be widely available in the coming months. Next, we’ll talk about the smaller updates that are currently available. A New Inbox Powered by AI Keeping track of an email inbox has become a laborious task. When someone sends you an email, you can read and reply to it, delete it or ignore it. The easiest option is to ignore an email, but unread notes accumulate over time and increase stress. (Case in point: My Gmail app icon currently shows a red bubble for 131,000 unread emails.)
The way people check their email is fundamentally altered by Google’s new AI Inbox. Based on recent emails, it provides a high-level overview of what you need to know and do today by analyzing conversations, developing action items, and summarizing topics. The AI Inbox offered me respite from my chaotic inbox this week. Recently, I had discussed my daughter’s enrollment in a local preschool via email. Around the same time, her pediatrician had sent an email asking me to fill out a questionnaire. However, a number of unsolicited emails and marketing messages from retailers began to pile up in my inbox throughout the day.
When I clicked on the AI Inbox tab, Google’s A.I. reminded me of my recent conversations and presented a to-do list: Respond to the preschool about enrollment and fill out the questionnaire for the pediatrician. There was no additional noise in my inbox. Although a limited number of users are participating in Google’s AI Inbox testing, I anticipate that many people, particularly busy parents and office workers, will find the feature useful when it becomes available to the general public in the coming months.
Free Software The following Gmail tools, which were previously only available to users who paid for subscriptions to use Google’s AI, are now available for free: personalized responses that were suggested. Gemini will now analyze a message and generate a bespoke response based on your writing style in past emails.
AI Overviews with email summaries. Gmail will display an automatic summary of a conversation at the top of each email thread, similar to the AI Overviews that are available on Google search. A “Help Me Write” button. To compose an email, users can type a prompt, such as “Draft a letter to my power company asking why my bill is so high,” and then click “Help Me Write.” As a professional writer, I mostly did not find these tools helpful, but people who struggle with words might appreciate having them.
Paid Tools
Google has also released new tools that will be available initially to people paying for a subscription to one of Google’s A.I. plans, which start at $20 a month:
Overviews of AI for email search. In the past, people could look for emails by typing keywords like “plumber” into a search bar. Users can now type a question into the search bar, such as “Who fixed my toilet last year?” I liked this feature — it will come in handy especially for people with bloated inboxes, since the old-school way of searching for the keyword “plumber” could load lots of irrelevant emails.
A proofread tool. Google’s A.I. can highlight an entire sentence that needs improvement and suggest a full revision. For example, it could trim a rambling sentence down to a few concise words.
Does Gemini in my inbox mean Google is reading my emails?
The integration of A.I. inside Gmail raises an important question about whether the technology opens doors to human reviewers reading our emails. That’s because in general, humans are involved in improving A.I. technology — for example, people occasionally need to manually review conversations with A.I. chatbots to ensure that their responses are accurate and appropriate.
The answer is complicated with regard to Google and Gmail. The company claims that, despite the fact that its Gemini artificial intelligence system is able to scan your emails and provide assistance, individuals do not look at your content, including the questions you ask Gemini to search for an email. Additionally, the business stated that it will not be utilizing Gmail data to train or enhance Gemini. “We know it takes a lot of trust for people to invite A.I. to connect these dots,” said Blake Barnes, Google’s vice president of product overseeing Gmail, in an interview.
“In these isolated environments, we can use AI to process and do these things like the AI Inbox without humans in the loop at all.” Mr. Barnes offered the following analogy: Each Gmail user lives in their own individual room. Gemini is given a question and a set of emails inside that room that might have the answer to it. He added that the data does not leave the private room to train Gemini because all of this processing takes place there. However, just because a company says it won’t look at your data doesn’t mean it technically can’t.
According to a Google spokesperson, law enforcement can access and share certain user interactions with Gmail’s artificial intelligence (AI) in response to a legal search warrant, such as questions posed to Gemini to search for emails. She noted that Google pushed back on government requests for excessive information.
Nothing new here. Google and all tech companies have been required to comply with legal requests for relevant user data, including emails and text messages, in response to search warrants and subpoenas. The only difference is that now, when you talk to Gemini in Gmail, you can also look at data from your inbox. “It’s a reminder to people that email should be treated almost not quite public,” said Thorin Klosowski, a privacy and security activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. “It should be treated like the company who runs it and law enforcement can access it. The more you put it in it, the more they’ll have access to.”
As a result, if you employ these tools, refrain from slandering Gemini. Should I decline? All of the above features, with the exception of AI Inbox, which has yet to be released, are turned on for Gmail users by default, meaning you will have to opt out if you are uninterested in using them. To opt out, go into the account settings and uncheck the box labeled “Smart features.”
