Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
We all know that tech companies track everything about our online habits. But actually facing it is another thing How They have a lot of data about you.
This was the experience of tech journalist Pranav Dixit, who experimented with using Google’s new “Personal Intelligence” feature for Gemini and its search engine’s AI mode. And boy, did things get personal? The AI was able to dig up everything from her license plate to her parents’ vacation history, sometimes without being directly requested.
“Personal Intelligence feels like Google has been quietly taking notes on my entire life and has finally decided to hand me the notebook,” Dixit said. wrote in a piece for business insider.
Google rolled out personal intelligence to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra customers last week. Once you opt in, the AI can scour your Gmail and Google Photos accounts, and a more powerful version released for the Gemini app earlier this month goes even deeper, digging through your search and YouTube history as well. In short, if you’ve ever used Google for anything, it can probably dig it.
This shows in a way that Google wants to maintain its lead in the AI race. Unlike competitors like OpenAI, it has decades of user data on billions of people. This can infer a lot from your Google searches alone, and your Gmail account is probably filled with confirmations and reminders of all kinds of life events, from doctor’s appointments to hotel bookings to online purchases.
If the idea of letting AI walk you through all this sounds like a privacy nightmare, you’re probably not wrong. Google, for its part, maintains that it is careful about your personal secrets, with VP Josh Woodward emphasizing Recent Blog Posts It trains its AI only on your signals and the responses they generate – not on things like your photos and emails.
He summarized, “We don’t train our systems to know your license plate number.” “We train them to understand that when you ask for something, we can figure it out.”
Whatever the ethics, Dixit estimates that giving AI access to your data at least makes for a really useful – and in his phrase, “spooky-good” – personal assistant.
When asked to come up with some sightseeing ideas for his parents, Personal Intelligence correctly guessed that they had already done a lot of hiking on previous trips to the Bay Area, and suggested some museums and gardens instead.
Gemini tells Dixit that he pulled it together from “breadcrumbs”, including emails, photos of the forest he trekked in, parking reservations in Gmail, and a Google search for “easy hikes for seniors.” It also tracked their license plate numbers based on photos stored in their Google library and scanned their emails to correctly report them for their car insurance renewal.
Privacy isn’t the only concern this feature raises. With data, chatbots can seem more human, giving the impression that they are well aware of users’ personal lives. This is a dangerous path to take amid reports of many people falling prey to mental health delusions because they believe AI are trustworthy companions; Dixit speaks to this when he complains about how he “poured my soul into ChatGPT and got a smart reply,” only for it to “forget that I existed like a genius goldfish.” Experts have focused on ChatGPT’s “memory” because it appears to be very much alive based on what you said in previous conversations.
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