Google updates its Help Me Write tool in Gmail so that the AI analyzes your email history and generates drafts with a more personal tone. The promise is that the texts will stop sounding generic. The feature, available with Gemini Advanced, connects to your Drive and inbox for context. But there's a catch: if your previous emails were already written by another AI, the system feeds back on its own prose.
Augmented context with Gemini and Drive 🤖
The update improves the AI's ability to capture nuances by reviewing previous emails and Google Drive documents. The system seeks to understand your style, from vocabulary to sentence structure. However, the algorithm does not distinguish between human text and text generated by another machine. This means that if you have used previous assistants, the model learns from an already artificial style. The result is a loop where the AI imitates another AI that was imitating a human.
Emails written by AI about emails written by AI 🔄
The real problem is not that the AI sounds robotic, but that we delegate communication to an assistant that now tries to sound human using as a sample emails already written by another assistant. It's like asking a parrot to recite a poem it learned from another parrot. Google sells us personalization, but if we all use the same tool, the result will be a homogeneous mass of polite, correct, and profoundly boring emails. The irony is trademarked.