A Google search executive said that considered one of the corporate's biggest opportunities in AI lies in its ability to get to know the user higher and personalize their answers.
The promise is an AI that’s uniquely helpful since it knows you. But the chance is that AI feels more like surveillance than service.
In a current one Consequence Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, explained on the Limitless podcast that Google's AI tends to reply more queries that ask for advice or where the user is on the lookout for recommendations – and that most of these questions usually tend to profit from more subjective answers.
“We imagine there may be an excellent opportunity for our AI to get to know you higher after which be helpful to you in unique ways based on that knowledge,” Stein said within the interview. “And considered one of the things we talked about at I/O (Google’s developer conference) was how AI can gain a greater understanding of you thru connected services like Gmail.”
Google has been integrating AI into its apps for a while, even back when Gemini was still referred to as Bard. More recently began retrieving personal information into one other AI product, Gemini Deep Research. And Gemini is now integrated with Google Workspace apps like Gmail, Calendar, and Drive.
But as Google integrates increasingly personal data into its AI – including your email, documents, photos, location history and browsing behavior – the road between a helpful and an intrusive assistant is becoming increasingly blurred. And unlike opt-in services, Google's data collection may turn out to be harder to avoid because AI plays a central role in the corporate's products.
Google argues that this deep personalization makes AI way more useful. The idea is that Google's AI technology could learn from the user's interactions across Google's various services after which use that knowledge to make more personalized recommendations. For example, if it learns that a user likes certain products or brands, the AI ​​responses could favor those in its recommendations.
That can be “rather more useful,” Stein says, than simply showing users a more general list of top-selling products in a particular category. “I believe that’s precisely the vision – to create something that may be really insightful specifically for you.”
This idea isn't all that different from the way in which the “Others” on the hit Apple TV show “Pluribus” devoured the world's knowledge, including intimate details about individuals. When the system interacts with the series' protagonist, Carol, it uses this data to personalize every part: cooking her favorite dishes, adopting a well-known face to speak along with her, and otherwise anticipating her needs.
But Carol doesn't just like the personalized answers; she finds them invasive. She never agreed to pass on her data to the hive mind, nevertheless it knows her higher than she would really like.
Likewise, within the age of AI, evidently it’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid Google's data-devouring methods, and if Google doesn't get the balance right, the outcomes could feel more scary than useful.
(To be clear, Google helps you to control the apps that Gemini uses to tell its AI about you more specifically – at Gemini you'll find it under “Connected Apps”). Settings.)
If you share app data with Gemini, Google says It stores and uses this data in accordance with the Gemini Privacy Policy. And this policy reminds users that human reviewers are allowed to read a few of their data and never enter sensitive information that you just don't need a reviewer to see or that Google doesn't use to enhance its services.
However, as increasingly data is absorbed into Google's own Swarm system, it's easy to see how AI could make privacy increasingly of a gray area.
However, Google believes it has some form of solution.
Stein says Google will indicate when its AI responses are personalized.
“I believe people intuitively want to grasp once they're being personalized — when information is being provided to them and when (it's) something that everybody would see in the event that they asked that query,” he said.
Stein also identified that Google could send users a push notification when a product that they had been occupied with after researching online for several days is on the market or on sale.
“There are all these ways in which Google is now incredibly helpful to you in all modes and in all different facets of your life…” he said. “And I believe that’s more my vision for the long run of search than any particular feature or a single form factor.”
