The fine line Google forgot to avoid crossing
Maybe if the info I’m being served up here were exceptionally useful, this could be a tradeoff I’d be at least a little more likely to accept. Maybe. But in this scenario, it just feels odd and a little too invasive — which I’ve come to realize is a common theme surrounding much of what seems to be the next level of our forced-upon-us AI future.
Take Google’s Gemini Spark, for instance — the “agentic” AI assistant announced at Google I/O that’s meant to be a “proactive” helper tackling tasks on your behalf. David Pierce from The Verge got an early look at the tool in action and called it “the most impressive and terrifying AI experience” he’s had to date, also bringing that “creepy” word into the equation:
I can’t shake the deeply creepy feeling I get from the whole thing. What Spark did feels sort of magical, and very invasive. It’s weird that Spark is so casually telling me the names and ages of my children, reminding me that it knows where I live, and finding information I know for a fact I’ve never volunteered to Google. Intellectually, I know that Google knows an incredible amount about me — add up my emails, my calendar, my photos, and my search history, and you’ve pretty much got me pegged. But seeing Spark treat all that data not as something to be protected, but as something to be mined, just feels bad.
And that, I think, mirrors the exact reaction I’ve been experiencing with Dreambeans. We’ve all always known that Google knows a lot about us, but we’ve also — at least intellectually — understood how all of that data is and isn’t being used. And it’s never been rubbed in our faces just how much the company can figure out about us by putting all the various pieces together and creating an awkward sense of robotic intimacy.